by Cal, Sarah
It had been the best decision, though, in spite of what Chase had told her, after their home was invaded and when he'd been trying to tell her they should do nothing. He should have known she couldn’t have stood for that.
Emma thought about Chase's comments from after the fight after she left the patients and waited to see if anyone else who needed help and was still unassisted. About how she'd been too calm after people got killed.
What she still didn’t get, was why did she have to care? Yes, people died, but all the ones that did were the bad guys. They were the ones that came out of nowhere, thinking it was right to steal from other people, and to do it with force. They were armed, and Emma didn’t doubt that if she and her family hadn't behaved, they might have shot at them without remorse.
So why should she have remorse for people that would kill others to get what they wanted? They had been willing to kill, and had shown it clearly on their second night. They sent out the first threat, before Kellen took the first shot. Every single one of them had guns and didn’t hesitate to show it. If they'd had any conscience, hell, any smarts, they wouldn’t have come out threatening with weapons in hand. If they'd wanted to live, they would have chosen the smart options.
They didn’t.
So there was no reason Emma should feel bad. If they had killed someone she'd managed to talk into her plan, maybe, but that didn’t happen.
But... was that right?
That she felt no remorse, that she even felt justified. Hell, she had been ready to attack them, gun wielding psychos, with her holding nothing but a knife in her hand. She didn’t believe she was wrong in this but what if she was? Emma wondered if she'd become too cold-hearted. But what had being soft done for her? Besides get her and her family hurt. If she'd been as she was now back then, a lot of her misfortunes could have been avoided.
She realized that their old lives, before all the electricity shut down, as teachers and ordinary people seemed so long ago, despite it actually only being a few weeks.
But then, in those few weeks, way too much had happened. She had seen way too much death and destruction, seen degradation in other towns that she feared would happen in her home. She had faced death several times. The recent attack was the one time she came out of it not feeling like she would fall apart after, and why shouldn’t she be glad of that? She hated giving into any weakness, and it had only grown more with recent events. This time, she didn’t need a breather after doing something she needed to do, for the good of her family.
She couldn’t conceive of ever going back to her old life, were it still possible. And she was starting to believe it wouldn’t.
Not to mention, it would be more dangerous if she was her old self. She'd faced many dangerous situations outside but she'd faced just as much, if not worse, at home. She couldn’t afford someone coming after her family while she was hesitating. More than just losing their supplies, their respect in their neighbors' and the whole town's eyes, they could just as easily die, and Emma had every intention of holding that back for as long as she could.
She wondered if everywhere fell apart as easily as her home town.
"How are you holding up after all the excitement?"
Emma arched her eyebrows at Carol's comment. Particularly, calling the shootout that happened in front of her house as 'all the excitement.' It was certainly one way to look at it, a very apt way, but it had also been bloody.
And how was she holding up? Well, Emma was doing just fine, actually. But looking at Carol's face, her expression, Emma could tell that wouldn't be enough for her.
"There was..." she began, talking without thinking it through. She looked down as she pulled the gloves off her hands, moving away from the patient she'd just finished seeing to throw them in the trash. "It was a heck of a night. But there is something that bothers me, I guess. You remember Chase, right? My best friend, whose staying at my house. He was there when the whole thing went down, but then after he was... shaken up, which is understandable..."
Carol nodded along as Emma spoke, face blank so Emma couldn’t tell what the other woman was thinking. She didn’t interrupt with any opinion, and Emma looked away from her eyes, before forcing herself to return the straightforward gaze.
"So I got him a drink, and I was watching him take too much too fast, and he said I was a little too calm after over ten people had died. I told him it was because it was necessary, and then he said he doesn’t recognize who I am anymore. What am I supposed to do with that?"
Emma waited for Carol's opinion, chewing on her lower lip. She took a moment of deliberation then sighed, folding her arms across her chest.
"Remember that by like Chase grew up playing shooting games and rugby—games that mothers thought were too rough for precious little girls. They can let out their aggression through them. Women tend to go a little wilder in the face of a situation like the previous night."
Emma frowned when Carol paused her words, wondering where she was heading with this. She wasn’t sure if it was true, certainly not for everyone, but Emma didn’t have a lot of aggression growing up at all. Chase probably did, he chose the path of a physical teacher, after all, and he was something of an adrenaline junkie. There wasn’t a sport she'd heard of that he hadn't tried at least once. And yet, she didn’t think he'd actually done anything last night, but he had reacted that way. She hadn't seen Brian after, but she was pretty sure he was doing a lot better than Chase.
Then Carol was patting her arm, surprising her. "It's okay if you enjoyed the adrenaline rush. You've been put in situations where you were left powerless, but last night was your first time in a battle and you took part in it. There's nothing wrong with how you felt."
"I didn’t enjoy it necessarily," Emma claimed, the words out of her mouth before she could think them through, sounding just a little too defensive.
Carol just looked at her like she knew better, but she didn’t argue. "Just know if you need to talk, I'm always available."
Emma just watched her walk away, wondering why she would need to.
She thought about what Carol said. She reminded herself, that they lived in a new world now, and that it was survival of the fittest. Her sister had even told her that once, and her fight was stronger because she wasn’t just fighting for herself. Her fight was for her, and her sister and grandmother, the two people that meant the world to her. Merry, who still suffered from delusions, was too thin, almost always lost to her nightmares and 'predictions.' Her grandmother, who was slowly losing her memory and sense of self, and one day, they wouldn’t be able to snap her out of it. That and taking into account her age...
They had to be protected, and Emma had taken on the role like she had for everything in else in the family once she'd graduated high school and her grandmother found it difficult to keep working when she had arthritis. This was wholly different, but the responsibility rested almost comfortably on her shoulders, just one more thing she needed to do for them.
Emma supposed those women wouldn't be the last to invade the town, and they may have to kill herself. What good was remorse, when all it would do was hold her back? In her house, she was the first line of defense. Chase had promised to look after her family, but she couldn’t depend entirely on him. If he helped, then good. If not, well. She just needed to not let her enemies get past her to the more fragile members of her family. If others came...
Emma clenched her fists and promised herself she would be ready when they did.
Chapter Eight
Emma decided she needed to be more prepared for a fight when it came again.
With how dangerous the world had become lately, she couldn’t afford to relax even when she was at home. The idea just came to her one day and wouldn’t leave her alone, until she really thought about it and decided to take it seriously. It could give her an edge if she ever found herself in a tight spot.
There was little she could do against weapons without one herself, but some level of self-defense would be helpf
ul in some circumstances. At least, she would have some level of confidence in a situation where she needed to fight without a weapon.
Who to ask though? It wasn’t like she had that many avenues. There was Chase, but he was still acting a little weird around her. She didn’t like how he was acting, but what could she do about it? She didn’t want to force him to conform to what she wanted. He claimed she had changed, and she hadn't tried very hard to refuse it, because it would be a lie. Still, Chase had been with her through most of those changes, so why should he be surprised? She wasn’t going to force him to accept the way she was now, if he really didn’t want to, but she would give him the time to think and decide if he wanted to.
A frightening thought occurred to her when she thought about what he said to her that night, and how he'd acted around her since. Chase had told her he loved her, right after he saw her in bed with Brian, a man he'd once been friends with. He'd thought she had known, but apparently Emma was just too self-centered to realize, leaning on Chase for help, accepting it when it was offered, and not thinking of more than that. It had flustered her, when he said he loved her. Of course, then he'd threatened to leave—and she used that word only because it had felt like a threat to her, though to him it might have been self-preservation—but Emma hadn't wanted that so he'd given her the time to think about it.
She hadn't, not really. It hadn't been all that long ago and there was always one thing after another coming at them that took up her attention. But with what had happened recently, she wondered if it still held true. It hurt, thinking that he might have changed his mind, before pushing the thought away and not looking into it too closely.
What she really wanted was for things to be like they had been before, sort of. She didn’t want Chase ignoring her, at least, or getting that sad look in his eyes when they landed on her. They used to be happy around each other, even while in the middle of a crisis, and Emma wanted that back. She had come to realize that she needed less support from Chase, now that she was becoming strong on her own, but that didn’t mean she didn’t need him at all. He still made up a pretty big part of her life, or at least the parts that she cared about.
She didn’t think they were fighting exactly, but when she thought of learning self-defense and her thoughts jumped to him, she had hesitated, and that irritated her. Since when did she hesitate with her best friend, once she'd decided Chase earned the title? This was something they could get through, given a little time.
But considering she wanted to get it on with as soon as possible, she really didn’t have much of a choice. It wasn’t like there weren’t other options, just a lot of them had so many cons compared to the one good thing that would come out of the whole thing, and she didn’t think they were worth it. So it was Chase, unless she wanted to live boldly and try asking Brian, if he even knew how to fight at all, but that option carried its own can of worms. That she was nowhere near ready to deal with.
They hadn't really talked much since that day, when she and Brian had gone over to their house and Kellen had offered her help voluntarily to help prepare them for an enemy attack. They'd had a heart to heart, and Emma liked to think it meant something, but she and Kellen weren’t exactly back to being friends, if they had ever been anything more than neighbors to begin with.
The situation between her and Kellen was okay at the moment, and she didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that. She had a feeling contacting her husband, after she had promised there was nothing between them, was a good way to do just that. Brian had also gone back to staying at his place full time, so he would have to come over for the lessons, and though Kellen had chilled down, Emma didn’t want to cause her paranoid side to rear its head again. Actually, she hadn't seen Brian at all since the fight, and she didn’t want to get in the way of the couple fixing their problems. She'd done enough interfering already.
Seeing as she didn’t exactly have that many options, she approached Chase. Merry and Janice were away in their rooms after having a quick wake up meal for the day, which left her and Chase in the lower rooms. He seemed relaxed, a far cry from how he'd been after the fight, and she hesitated a little, not wanting to disturb his peace. But then he caught sight of her, and she couldn’t just withdraw then.
Still, the change in him was almost instant, and it actually hurt. He was suddenly more tensed, barely noticeable, but she had known him enough to be able to tell. His expression went from relaxed to guarded with a tightness around his eyes that she couldn’t read. The only thing that hadn't changed much was the look in his eye. There was something dark behind it, but he still looked at her like she was a friend, and it gave her the courage to speak.
"Hey, Chase," she greeted him quietly. "How've you been?"
She winced. It was probably a stupid thing to say, though she did think it was apt. Since she was pretty sure he had been avoiding her before, she realized they had barely talked together in that time, and she didn’t know what he had been doing with all that time to himself.
He arched his eyebrows, looking unimpressed at her poor attempt. "I'm just fine, Emma. I've been sticking around the house and helping your grandmother out with her garden."
She nodded. For some reason, she hadn't thought to look for him outside back, not that she had seen him the few times she'd gone back there since the fight. She just didn’t want to end up seeing the ruined shed door again because she knew she would just get angry. Her anger had been lost, because she'd gotten what she wanted, their attackers out of their lives for good.
"Was there something you needed?" Chase asked with a sigh when she just stood there and didn’t say anything more.
Emma bit her lip. Well, it wasn’t like she'd been able to hide things from him before, right? She took a breath and stepped closer. "I just wanted to ask you something."
"What is it?"
"Can you show me some basic self-defense moves?"
He blinked at her, and then frowned. "Why?"
She rolled her eyes, wondering why he was confused. "In case I ever need to defend myself, I need to learn how, don’t I?"
He sighed, giving her a hesitant look. "Why would you ever need that, hmm? If you stayed at home, you wouldn’t need it. And besides, it won't be all that much help, if something like before happens again, you can't fight against guns with your fists. There's no point in fighting then, so you really wouldn’t need to learn how."
He was reluctant, but she wasn’t letting up. She stated all the reasons why this was a good idea. If she was in a situation where she could defend herself, wouldn’t it be the best move to do so? If she knew how to the right way, so she wouldn’t accidentally hurt herself in the fight. She could tell he was still in a strange mood after he'd snapped at her. She didn’t know what to say to get him to turn back to how he was before, but at the moment her plan was to let it run its course.
In the meantime, she wanted to learn how to fight, and she would be after him until he taught her.
"Please Chase?" she pled, hands pressed together in front of her. "Could please just do this one thing for me? Even if it won't be useful, it would make me feel a little safe."
He was hesitating again, and she could see she was wearing him down. Finally, he gave in to her.
"Fine. I'll teach you the much I know, but it doesn’t mean you have to keep getting into fights. If you find yourself in a situation that could end up in a fight, the first thing you think to do is run. You only engage, if you don’t think you can. Nod if you understand me, shake your head and this ends here."
She was nodding before he even finished his words, eager to start learning.
Emma knew the reason why he gave in at all, considering how reluctant he was to have her fighting at all. It was because he couldn’t bear to refuse her and then have her get hurt, when the little knowledge he could give her would have saved her. They didn’t have weapons anymore, and there was no way Emma was going to start walking around with knives, so this was the next best thing.
> They head out to the garden and Chase showed her some basic moves, like how to escape a headlock and which areas to aim for if you're in someone's grip.
"Chances are pretty high you'll be going up against people stronger than you. But even I they look weaker, never underestimate someone willing to fight you. Plenty of people tend to cover up weaknesses with smart, or tricky fighting, so look out for that, too."
She listened to his words, just barely, as he followed explanations with demonstration. Emma felt a little shy as he pulled her gently to his chest in a headlock. It had been some time since she had been this close to Chase and there wasn’t some immediate danger or trouble to look forward to.
Don’t think about that!
This wasn’t the best time to be thinking about that sort of thing. She had to concentrate on what Chase was trying to teach her. She feared a little, that if she didn’t pay enough attention and he noticed, he might refuse to continue, and she needed this.
She showed him what she'd learned, doing her best to remember all his instructions, forcing her mind to focus on the matter at hand.
"You're a fast learner," Chase told her, but without much conviction.
She paid some attention to Chase, not just what he was trying to teach her, and felt a light ache in her chest. He looked like he would rather be anywhere else but there. It hurt a little, but she was still worried about him. Hard not to, when he wasn’t acting like himself at all.
Emma lightened the mod by pretending to box with him. She'd watched a couple of matches with him, one of those times she'd even paid attention. Still, she was just goofing off. There wasn’t much need to remain serious, not when Chase was clearly not into this. The best move, if she really wanted him to keep teaching her, would probably be getting him to relax for it.
Chase took the bait, and they play-fought. Emma was exhilarated, having something close to fun for the first time in a long time, and by having Chase's hands on her, as well, even though they were just messing around.