You’re convinced Tess hates you for the longest time. The way she and Joel operate is like a well oiled machine. The boss and her guard dog, ready to snap at anybody who gets too close.
You keep your head down, for the most part. Dealing the occasional odd collectors item for those willing to spare the tags for it between burning bodies and cleaning up trash.
Working “with” Tess didn’t sound right. Given that every time you walked into a room her eyes never left you as if she expected you to steal from right under her nose.
Working..near her was better.
Joel wasn’t much kinder, he hardly spoke to begin with. More keen to stand back and watch with dark eyes and bruised hands ready to curl into fists at the first sign of trouble.
The first time you come and see her with a split lip and a bruise three-days old is when you see something in her eyes as she looks at you. Not the regular annoyance at your existence or the caution in her eyes each time you walk into the room.
You almost called it ‘concern’ but you weren’t that stupid.
“Hell of a shiner you got.”
You grinned, the split of your lip only growing wider.
“Yeah well, you know me-” You’re too busy counting the credits owed to her to see the look she gives Joel, who has the same concern flickering across his face and furrowing his brows before you look up and it’s gone. “-I’m a real wild child.”
You don’t know it, but she asks around.
Joel is the one who reminds her that it’s none of her business. The cold voice of reason and protection in the world where you can only look out for yourself.
‘You gonna stick your neck out for every pretty pair a’ legs that walks through that door?”
But he already knows the answer to it. He knows that she keeps an eye out for when you wander off to deal in the dark and with who, when you slip out at night, testing the skill of the soldiers on guard because you’re an idiot who gets stir crazy every damn night and puts them both into a panic because one of these days your name is gonna be on the execution list if you don’t sharpen up.
“Don’t act all high and mighty. I saw you staring at her ass too.”
You have an inkling that they’re the reason your last customer is in the Medical bay with a broken jaw after he tried getting more than just some vintage porno mags from you, but you don’t probe them.
You’ve learned to take what they give you and be grateful for it.
You’re younger than them, just barely. Only a few years difference but they think it’s a world apart. It’s the mutual martyr complex they both have, one that keeps them together and others at arms length that is just so goddamn nauseating to deal with. They both want you but won’t do a damn thing because they think you deserve better than them as if you haven’t seen the world on fire twenty years ago and grieved your dead with trembling hands just the same as them.
But they see the way the younger FEDRA guard’s let their eyes linger when you walk by and the more brave men who will try to sidle up to you on the days where the rot in the air clears just enough for you to look up at the sky with the remnant of a smile.
You’re pretty, even with the sweat of a ten hour day tossing bodies into a fire staining your clothes and dripping into your eyes.
They won’t make a move until you do. It’s been too many years of just one another, holding each other in nothing but survival and self-loathing to think they deserve not only each other but you as well.
Until then, they have each other.
God help these fucking morons.
