#and me insisting 'if they don't go to Abandoned Disneyland I'm going to explode'

[uhohbestie]

There Are Monsters Nearby [Chapter 6]

🏜 Pairing: Grian/Scar

🧟‍♂️ Tags: zombie AU, zombie apocalypse, lovers to exes, slow burn, eventual reconciliation

📖 Summary: The day after Scar breaks up with Grian, the dead come back to life. Knowing that venturing out alone is a death sentence, the sudden onset of the apocalypse forces them to stick together despite the tensions between them. In the wreckage of the world, they're forced to survive side-by-side, coming to terms with the fact that—try as they might—there's no one they trust more than each other.

Chapter 6 - Walking through the wasteland that is Anaheim, Grian allows Scar to talk him into taking a detour to the happiest place on earth.

📝 Words: 7,523

🔗 Link: Read Chapter 6 on AO3

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“Cub told me the parks had shut down. We didn’t know why at the time, of course, but… they’ve been closed. I doubt there was anyone there other than a handful of maintenance staffers when things went sideways, and they weren’t going to stay at their post and go down with the ship… I don’t think going there will be any more or less dangerous than us being out here in the open, wandering down the middle of the freeway.”

Grian doesn’t respond, taking Scar’s words in and trying desperately to see the sense in them.

He breathes out through his nose, calming his racing pulse as best he can.

“I just want to look,” Scar adds, a gentler bargain than Grian deserves. “See the castle from a distance, take a peek at the front gates… we’re heading in that direction anyway.”

Grian chews at the inside of his mouth, struggling against the tide of petulance that rises up to battle the despair within him; the dismal sense that he’s already lost. That he lost the moment Scar saw the road sign in the first place.

It’s not that he doesn’t feel Scar has earned this. Before things had all gone wrong he liked to imagine that he’d always been happy to indulge the easy passions in Scar’s life.

It’s simply the reality of their current situation- the persistent pressure of his anxiety, placed like a heel against his throat- that rankles him, causing him to twist in on himself with a defensive pettiness he knows is unfair.

“We look at it as we walk by,” he manages after a silence that stretches on too long, offering the words like a magnanimous compromise—like he hadn’t been thoroughly shaken by Scar’s threat to leave. “We don’t get carried away.”

When he looks up, Scar is beaming at him.

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We're back with another chapter of our zombie au! This one was really fun for us to write- I've always been a sucker for the history of the Disney parks, so I loved having a chance to ramble about my favourite parts of them.

You can read the whole story thus-far linked below!

You may not rest now, There Are Monsters Nearby (on ao3!)