Can be opened up anytime now! PV members (only those who can help in one way or another) can now reply; no more than two or three, and the thread will not go for much longer either.
Exhaustion taxed him, weighing his shoulders more than the blue-eyed boy hoisted over them. It heavied him, pulled him down with more weight than the arm he had left behind in the rubble — what a gruesome sight that would be forever found it, he humored to himself amidst the dizziness and spinning white before his eyes — and though he knew his feet were still moving, it was as if he himself had disconnected from them and left them behind as well. He felt as if a spirit, hovering, floating so quickly over the great white earth, over the Phoenix Valley he loved. He loved every step he took, he knew, because it was on Phoenix Valley. It was for that pack, the place Iskata had left him — no, the place he loved. The cyclops could not cling to that excuse forever. Each hot breath he heaved he loved; each blinding sting of white that blew into his eye and past it he loved, and suddenly it became impossible not to laugh, to chortle in the face of such love, and suddenly all else was forgotten but the determination to save his pack, to save his son, and it was so goddamn funny...
And yet he knew it was not funny, but could not restrain those laughs from rising from his chest. Why was it so damn funny? It struck him then, despite the whirling gold and red and blue and the spots, that he was becoming delirious, but oh, there was the ranch! But it's collapsed, he told himself, and yet he floated on towards it. Would Geneva be inside? Geneva, he laughed, Geneva will laugh so hard. She will laugh so hard when she figures out I can't reach the ground. Pripyat will laugh, too. Everyone will laugh.
Everyone would laugh. But at the ranch's front steps, Jefferson did not. The colors faded to white — was he seeing snow? Was that heaven? What was taunting him with such light, such beauty? He felt himself hauling something heavy from his shoulders down onto the steps. What was that? It's so heavy. How was he moving so automatically? There's a ghost in me, he wanted to laugh. It's moving my body for me. Where is it taking me? I don't think I wanted to leave that heavy thing there.
But he did. His feet took him a few steps back, and to his knees he fell, and then to the ground. Jefferson soaked in the white, succumbing to it, succumbing to the cold. His body shivered there, though he felt nothing but numbness, and all he knew was white... and soon, black. Consciousness fading, the snow began coating the Patriarch's unmoving body in a fine dust of white. His chest heaved weak breaths, though he would not know it. He knew nothing but unconsciousness, a black unconsciousness, devoid of all humor...
The snow was quick to cover it, but a fine trail of blood had followed him there and encircled his resting place, its flow incessant.
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