Chapter Text
Shaw wakes up one day and knows he’s dying. It sits in his throat, crushes his lungs with its certainty, and he barely finds it in himself to fight it. So much of him just wants to lay there and let it happen. It wouldn’t be hard to just stop breathing, especially with everything in his life pressing down on him.
But deep inside of him is that one spark, and he grips it tightly, swinging his legs out of bed and looking around his shitty one room apartment. His skin crawls as he thinks about the fact that he has to pay rent today, and go to work, and he’s supposed to meet up with someone for drinks. Yesterday that had all been fine; a week ago it had been good. But today Shaw is dying, and all of that is what’s killing him.
The floor creaks as he stands, and it soundtracks his movements as he collects his scant belongings. A few sets of clothes, a toothbrush and toothpaste, soap and a razor. He’s bought other things in his time here, but he leaves those undisturbed where they lie. They crawl with the corruption he can feel in his bones, and he’ll gladly take the financial hit over having to touch them ever again.
It takes him three minutes, give or take a few seconds, and Shaw leaves his keys in the middle of the floor. When he doesn’t pay rent, the landlady will come with her demands and complete lack of respect for privacy, and she’ll barge right in. She’ll have another tenant within a week, because where else can you find a place that will let you pay in cash and not run credit checks? Shaw wishes that future person luck with the cockroaches and the rats.
No one he passes in the halls talks to him, although they all look. Guarding their own lives and their hushed words from his incidental intrusion. Their eyes are hollow, the way Shaw feels right now. They have died, and unless he’s very careful, that’s what’s in store for him too. He shudders as he walks through the animated graveyard he once called home, and when he steps out into the light, the sun barely touches him. It does enough, though, and Shaw finds the will within him to keep walking.
As he distances himself from that building and from that life it housed, he can feel the certainty of his end fading. He has an out, he always has an out, and it’s the same one he picks every time. Three blocks away, he starts jogging. Two more blocks and he’s proper running, air burning in his lungs. He can’t stop, though, because he needs to burn that place out of him, with aching muscles and sweat.
His destination is a half hour walk away, and he makes it in a little over ten minutes. He wants to vomit, cramps in his gut reminding him he is not nearly well nourished or hydrated for this, but it’s worth it. Shaw walks into the self storage yard and no longer feels death quite so imminently and intimately on his back. When he finds his storage container, he drops the lock on the ground after opening it. He doesn’t need it any more, just like everything else from this place.
Shaw’s stomach settles as he walks into the small metal box and smiles, for the first time in at least a month. There she is, the love of his life, pristine and just waiting for him. He runs his hand gently over the gas tank of his Harley, taking a moment to fall in love with her again just the way he had the first day he’d bought her. His one constant, his true home. The only place he’s never felt out of place is in her saddle, and he wastes no more time in zipping up his leather jacket, putting on his helmet, and guarding his knuckles with kevlar gloves.
She roars to life with a turn of the key and a simple touch of the starter, and Shaw tears out of the storage yard like there’s something chasing him. Thank God for fuel injection, sitting there while she warmed up would have been awful. As is, Shaw twists his wrist and floods the engine with gas, actually managing a laugh as he takes off and leaves the city behind him.
Once the last of the skyscrapers have faded into his rearview, Shaw feels himself again. All he has is a backpack full of clothes and essentials, and a tank full of gas. He doesn’t even have a destination, but that’s always the way it’s been. Just take off, find a city big enough to not notice him, pick up some sketchy under the table work, and make a life for himself until it starts to kill him. Lather, rinse, repeat. No goodbyes, no one who will really care he’s gone. Some people might wonder, but he doubts they’ll even file a missing person’s report. When he takes off, there’s not a soul in the world who wants him to come back, and that’s the way it has always been.
Shaw likes it that way, though. It lets him be himself, absent anyone else’s expectations. It lets him make mistakes, and then just run away from them. No consequences and always something new ahead of him to look forward to.
Traffic thins rapidly outside of the city, and Shaw breathes in the non-polluted air with a deep, happy sigh. He bares his teeth in a grin he feels deep in his soul, and twists the throttle. Screw speed limits, screw traffic laws; this is what his bike is made for. It would be a crime to deny her it. The speedometer creeps higher, and Shaw presses her RPM right to the red line. His baby responds as beautifully as ever, just as eager to be going and gone as him.
Shaw is reckless on the road, always has been, always will be. It’s not a death wish, per se, more just the fact that he’s not alive anywhere else. He doesn’t want to die, but if he must, he’s damn sure it’s going to be clocking 180 on a stretch of road in between Regina and god-knows-where, because otherwise he’s already dead and his body simply hasn’t caught up yet. Shaw ducks into the oncoming lane and hops onto the shoulder, edging around cars and trucks barely doing twenty over the limit. More than a few honk at him, and he catches a few middle fingers when he glances over his shoulder. Shaw just smiles and waves; let the bitterness and boredom kill them, he’s not falling into that trap, that’s for damn sure.
As the sun climbs in the sky, the roads get hot, even with the extreme speeds Shaw is maintaining. Summertime in the prairies is hotter than hell, and Shaw debates turning westward. He’s heard it’s nice on the coast, more temperate, but then there’s the forest fires to contend with. Maybe next summer he’ll cross the Rockies before the season starts, and he’ll find some shitty hovel in Vancouver or Victoria. Plus there’s always work in the logging camps out that way.
Shaw vaguely considers the future as he presses his bike to the limits, taking advantage of the straight and flat roads to floor it. More important than a theoretical trip out West is his immediate future, though, and that’s making sure he doesn’t run out of gas. Burning his engine hard and high will chew through fuel like nobody's business, and being stranded in the ass end of nowhere is not exactly high on his to do list.
A quick glance at the trip odometer and a vague mental calculation lets Shaw know he can skip at least the next two shitty tiny towns and gas stations he passes, so he sets his mind to doing just that. Small towns always get to him in an awful sort of way, even in the short time he spends there to grab gas and a meal. Something about the way people look at you, as if they notice you. As if they would remember you if you came back in five years. Shaw doesn’t much care for it.
No, when he’s moving between places Shaw sleeps in fields and eats a whole lot of pop tarts, everything he can do to avoid any place that would be considered a town rather than a city. He doesn’t care for small talk, or for the people who think he wants that when he’s just trying to buy a bag of beef jerky. Big cities are better, no one cares, and he can just go about his life and move on.
Nothingness is even better than a big city, though, if Shaw’s being entirely honest. He looks around as he rips between fields of canola, and here his heart can settle in a decent sort of way. The sky is so incredibly vast and blue it could swallow him whole in his insignificance, and the farmland stretches beyond where his eye can see. There’s something incredibly calming about the vast emptiness of it all, and if Shaw could learn how to eat grass and drink dirt, he might be happy living out here.
But he can’t, of course, and his stomach reminds him of that with the slow onset of queasiness. Food had been neglected in favour of saving his own life from the zombification waiting for him, and there’s only so far both he and his bike can go without some sort of refuel. He doesn’t want to stop quite yet, though, still wanting to ride that high of being reborn, so Shaw passes by the next turn off to some tiny Saskatchewan town. Let him live, just a little longer, before he subjects himself to the crawling eyes of humble people.
It’s not that he thinks himself better than people who don’t run from major city to major city, far from it, in fact. Shaw holds immense respect for people who can live out a life without dying on the inside. The waitress at the diner in Ituna who had still smiled and laughed like she didn’t hate her life, even when her back was turned, for example. Her life is an inspiration, Shaw’s sure, a true sign of happiness and contentment. Not an inspiration for him, but one for someone who wants more out of life than to simply survive it.
Perhaps that’s being too harsh on himself, though. Shaw drops his left hand and pats his Harley’s gas tank. He wants to survive, and he wants to ride hard and fast. Not just bikes, of course, he’s had his fair share of fun taking pink slips off of fools, and he wouldn’t say no to getting in a fighter jet. But this, just going nowhere in a damn hurry, nothing but his thoughts to weigh him down, this is what his life is. Never contentment, never really happiness the way others might see it. But it’s good for him, better than he’s seen from a lot of others.
A grasshopper explodes against his shin with an audible thud, and a curse flies unbidden from Shaw’s lips, more due to shock than anything. Not that it doesn’t hurt, the fucker does sting, but it’s nothing compared to the pain Shaw’s learned to deal with. He shakes his head and glances down at his leg, bright green painted across his black jeans. Just his luck, he supposes, can’t let his thoughts stray too far from reality.
“Fucking bugs,” Shaw gripes, but there’s a certain amount of good humour in it.
If you’ve got to interact with bugs, splattering them into oblivion clocking one ninety on a straight stretch of highway is definitely the way to go. His windscreen - a necessity if you’re going to ride on highways for more than an hour without feeling like your shoulders are being ripped out of their sockets - is already streaked with the corpses of no doubt hundred of flies, and he’s sure his gloves have claimed a few victims. Benefits of gear; he doesn’t have to spend a half hour picking bugs from under his skin at the end of the day.
Shaw sees a sign for the next gas bearing town and glances down at his odo. Regretfully, it is time for him to stop. He could try to push it to the next one, but on the prairies there’s no guarantee when that will be. He’s got a cash and a Chatr phone that might work to call CAA if he runs out of gas, but coverage is spotty as hell and he doesn’t have any food or water. Heat stroke is a very real possibility if he has to wait on the side of the road, so Shaw sighs and takes the next exit.
He passes by the typical rusted metal sheds and apparent junkyards, not doing quite the speeds he had been moments ago, but still racing faster than the speed signs would like. There’s no one around to see him, anyway, and the only cars he passes are rusted out hulls in overgrown grass yards. He’s never been quite sure if people actually lived in those places, or if they were just the memories of people who thought they could build a life beyond their means. At least it’s only the metal that dies out here, rather than the people, as they do in the city.
The town, such as it is, appears basically out of nowhere, behind a stand of trees that must have been planted intentionally at some point but now look long neglected and feral. It seems to be a few shops, a little more than Shaw was expecting, the advertised gas station, and-
A dog, napping on the road, right in Shaw’s path, slowly sits up and looks in his direction. If Shaw had been going slower, maybe it could get up and leave the street, but he’s going almost ninety, and both he and the dog noticed each other a little too late for that.
Shaw slams on his breaks and swerves into the oncoming lane. With a gut punch of certainty, he knows that he’s made a rookie mistake. He feels his rear wheel lock up, going too fast and with too much pressure put on it, it starts to skid. Now, it’s not the first time Shaw’s locked the rear wheel; everyone’s done it, when starting out or when doing an emergency stop in the rain, or something. But usually you’re not going over one eighty kilometers an hour, and usually you have more time to react. If you’re going slower, or you’re lucky, you just step off the rear brake and it’ll sort out. If you’re phenomenally unlucky, or the universe hates you like it does Shaw, you go into a death wobble. Shaw’s stomach takes up residence in his throat as his bike does its best imitation of a snake, and he closes his eyes in the split second before it all goes wrong.
The last thing he consciously notices is that he did successfully avoid the dog. At least the universe doesn’t totally hate him.
In the strange way that brains work, Shaw notices every millisecond of the crash as it happens, but as soon as it’s done, he couldn’t recall a single detail with a gun to his head. All he knows is his wheel locking, the death wobble, and then looking up at the sky with his heart racing a million miles a minute and sounding like a bass drum in his skull.
As he registers the fact that he is, in fact, alive, Shaw’s heart calms slightly and he starts to reconnect with his body. The first order of business, breathing. He does so in a gasp that hurts like hell, and then he clues in to the fact that all of him hurts just as much or more. Okay, not dead is good, but there’s a lot more that could happen worse than dying.
The pain in every inch of him would hint against a broken neck or paralysis, but he has to be careful. He could have a fracture that he might make worse by moving. Hell, he could be bleeding out right now. He’s got to take account of himself, and fast, just in case. With small movements and tensing muscles, Shaw accertains with relative certainty that he’s not broken anything major, and a quick glance down doesn’t show any spurting blood. A small part of him notes that the grasshopper guts are still on his leg, even though the knee is ripped above it and his legs have clearly been lashed by the long grass he’s laying in.
Shaw manages to throw off his gloves and pry off his helmet, barely moving at all in the process but still ending up panting shallowly for breath.
“Sinclair! Goddamnit, Sinclair, here!” A voice calls out, and Shaw groans as he turns his head to look in that general direction. He sees nothing over the long, dry grass around him, but at least he’s confirmed he can move his head and neck, so that’s not broken. Given the current state of events, he should probably count that as a win.
Shaw turns his head back to looking up at the sky and sets his mind to sitting up. He feels like he just got the shit kicked out of him - which he did, in all fairness, just by momentum and the Earth itself - so the process isn’t as simple as he might hope. But nothing feels too drastic as he moves slowly, eyes closed tight against the pain of many, many bruises.
Before he’s done more than gotten his hands in position next to him to push himself up, something cold and wet thrusts into Shaw’s ear, and he bolts upright faster than is probably recommended for someone who just crashed their bike. He shouts in equal parts shock and pain, and smacks at the violated ear. Okay, he definitely has a broken rib or two, that’s less than ideal. Shaw hisses air through his teeth and breathes real shallow as fire races along his lungs.
A muted bark draws Shaw’s attention away from his own injuries, and he opens his eyes to see the dog he’d swerved to avoid, standing next to him. It’s a beautiful dog, immaculately groomed long golden fur, and big brown eyes that Shaw would like to imagine hold some amount of concern in them.
“Now, if I’d have died I’d be real pissed at you, pup,” Shaw grits out, focusing on the dog rather than his own pain, “but I can take a beating, so don’t worry too much.”
The dog barks again, and Shaw forms half of a chuckle before regretting that action as it sparks lightning bolts in his chest. At his pained grunt, the dog edges forward looking guilty, and he holds a hand out to it. It tucks its nose under his hand, and Shaw scratches its snout for a second. If he’d ever found a place that wouldn’t kill him, Shaw would have liked to have a dog.
“It’s okay, really-” Shaw starts to reassure the dog, but a shadow falls across them, and he looks up to see the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen standing over him, looking almost as guilty as the dog. The very dog who, on looking over and seeing her, leaves Shaw in a heartbeat to trot to her side. He would feel betrayed, but honestly, keeping his arm aloft to pet it wasn’t exactly the easiest thing in the world.
“Jesus Christ,” the woman mutters, looking Shaw over and sliding her gaze past him to where he can only assume his bike is. She shakes her head and looks back to him, stepping forward and planting her feet very deliberately before offering him a hand. “Do you think you can stand? Are you okay?”
“I-” Shaw starts, voice suddenly dry in his throat. He reaches up and takes her hand, eyes lingering on the black engine grease in her nail beds, before trying again, “I might be.”