Fic: We Go In Waves

[entangled_now]

Title: We Go In Waves
Fandom: Pushing Daisies
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: The Apocalypse
Spoilers: None
Disclaimer: In no way mine or anything to do with me. I own nothing.
Summary: In which Ned may have caused the apocalypse.
AN: Written for rashaka for the apocalyptothon. A huge thank you to sarren, who betaed this for me and made it a great deal better.


Young Olive Snook was nine years, three months and twenty one days old when, one lazy afternoon, spent in a way fitting for an adventurous child, she meandered down to the inviting edge of a nearby river.

Only to find a young neighbour floating face down in the water, presumed dead, much to the distress of his mother, only to be miraculously revived under the ministrations of an amateur lifesaver.

Filling Olive's young mind with both a sense of awe, and a certain suspicion regarding the exact line between life and death....

~~~

Blood

It's a particularly bright and unassuming morning when the water from all the taps in the city starts running red.

Olive finds out as much when she turns cold metal in the bathroom and a wash of red liquid sput-sputters into the sink, splashing against the edge and spraying tiny droplets across the back of one hand.

"What the hell?" She shakes it, which gets her an assortment of smeared little patches.

It's the same at the Pie Hole, a nasty glug of too-thick unpleasantness that doesn't fall like water at all.

Chuck appears at her shoulder, leaning over and smelling like candy apples and lilies up close.

"Is it doing that everywhere?" Her voice is a quiet mixture of intrigued and bewildered.

"You too huh, what is it, rust?"

Chuck slides over to the counter. "I don't think so, it's happening all over the place. I learned from a conversation two waitresses were having outside the coffee shop down the street that it tastes exactly like blood." Her eyes widen in a dramatic fashion, before Chuck hunts herself out a piece of pie and slides it towards her, via fork and fingers.

Olive wrinkles her nose, makes a disturbed noise and leans away from the sink.

"Oh my god, who would put blood in the water?!"

Chuck thinks about it for a minute.

"Animal rights activists?" she decides, around a mouthful of pie, plump and delicious with strawberries, their shiny red colour somewhat reminiscent of what had been gushing out of the taps all morning.

Olive determines that is more than enough to put her off tasting their delicious ripeness herself. "Where would they find that much blood to put in the water system?"

"Why would they use blood anyway? Surely they wouldn't get it from animals, which would defeat the purpose of animal rights? And if it's human blood then I think we have more serious problems, like the gang of murdering animal rights activists hacking people up in their sleep."

"They could be stealing it from hospitals," Olive suggests.

"That's almost as bad!" Chuck eyeballs the strawberry on her fork, then eats it anyway. "That's stealing blood from the people that really need it."

"I think someone would notice if gallons of blood just spontaneously up and disappeared." Olive says sensibly. "At least I hope somebody would notice. I don't want to live in a world where people don't notice when that much blood disappears."

Ned pops up from behind the counter, face a picture of disturbed unhappiness.

"Can we stop saying 'blood' in that ever so slightly sinister tone of voice? I wash fruit in that sink." He sinks a little deeper in his coat, eyeing the sinks like they might, at any moment, start spraying fountains of blood into his kitchen.

Sometimes Ned is unacceptably gloomy.

"It's an understandable concern, I don't think pretending it's not happening will make it go away."

Ned looks tempted to ask her if she's sure. Which is adorable, but not particularly helpful.

Frogs

It takes a day for the taps to slowly glug their way clean, but by 8am the next morning they're behaving again, streaming water in a way which isn't sinister at all. Though Olive still chooses to view them as a little suspicious, since torrents of what may or may not have been blood in the kitchen are not forgotten easily!

Or forgiven.

Olive gives the sink a mistrustful look while she carries pies over to the oven.

The sharp smell of fresh apples under her hands makes her look down.

The pie is not just full of delicious apple slices.

The pie is also full of frog-

Olive drops it on reflex; gives a helpless little shriek of surprise. The frog leaves the pie under the smack of tin on the wooden side. It flops onto the side, legs splayed out in front and behind, making patterns in the flour.

It then leaves the side in a smeared cloud of white, 'ribbiting' as it flops towards the floor in a messy graceless glide, before Olive can catch it.

The frog is now loose in the kitchen.

Olive is on her knees when she spies Chuck's shoes, bearing down on the frog's position.

"Mind the frog!" Olive yells, and Chuck comes to an abrupt halt.

"What frog- oh frog!" Chuck scoops said frog off the floor, and it wriggles frustratedly in her grip.

"He's actually kind of cute."

Olive rises, brushing flour off of her dress and then giving it up as a bad job when she realises she's just spreading handprints around.

"Sure, he's cute out of the pie, not so cute in. It's not so cute when I'm an inch away from making frog pie!"

"Did you startle Olive, did you?" Chuck asks the frog.

Olive grunts.

"Normally I'm not afraid of frogs, but normally frogs aren't stowing away in the pies, jumping out and startling me with their frogginess."

Chuck's eyebrows go up.

"What was a frog doing in the pie?"

"I don't know, I was-"

The door opens, and a gust of wind throws Ned and Emerson into the Pie Hole, which is a little surprising given the height and breadth of them both. Olive suspects they aided in their own flinging just a little.

They expand into a collection of coats and disturbed expressions that stop Olive's thought in its tracks.

"It's raining frogs." Ned's head is tipped to one side, curiously bewildered.

"What?"

"It's raining frogs, there is a rain of frogs, and forgive me if I find something strange about that." Emerson shakes his coat, like there's a chance it may still have frogs hiding somewhere in the lining.

"Frogs," Ned confirms.

"That seems to be going around," Chuck says, in a way that sounds oddly cheerful.

"Why would it rain frogs?" Olive asks of anyone who has a convincing answer to that question.

Chuck's frog chooses that moment to 'ribbit.'

Ned looks down.

"You have a-" His train of thought seems to have bounced off the tracks. That's going around as well apparently.

"I'm going to call him 'Maxwell,'" Chuck decides. Maxwell wriggles under the attention of Chuck's fingers.

Lice

The man from the health department is small and fluffy, neither of these are affectations, they both seem to be genetic. Olive thinks he fills his side of the booth with an air of apology and patience.

"You have an infestation," he says, in his quiet voice.

"Everyone has an infestation," Ned says carefully. He's holding his coffee between both hands, squeezing it in silent, nervous little gestures, and quite pointedly not scratching. Olive doesn't think it would matter much. Everyone is scratching.

Except Chuck...

Chuck seems to have some sort of lice repelling powers, and so does Digby, who's scratching, but only in the happy way dogs tend to do when they have nothing better to do. Digby is joyful in his scratching.

Strange magic indeed.

"That doesn't change the rules, it simply means the rules are being enforced over a wider area.

"A wider area being 'everywhere'?" Chuck points out sensibly. She really isn't scratching. Olive is very unhappy about this, since her own hair looks like someone rifled through it for loose change.

"I'm afraid the rules are the rules." The air of apology is almost visible as a small cloud over his head.

"So you're what, closing us all down?"

"Only temporarily, only temporarily, until steps are taken."

The small fluffy, apologetic man lays three shining white forms down in front of Ned.

"When the situation improves, simply fill in the forms and have them processed, someone will come and access your situation again; then, if all is satisfactory you can go about your business undisturbed."

Ned's expression manages to be forlorn, irritated and polite at the same time.

Olive thinks she probably would have glared at him if put in he same position.

She has a lot of glare and she knows how to use it to good effect.

Scratching ruins the effect somewhat.

The man and his apologetic cloud drift towards the door; Ned follows him, hands pushed into his pockets. Olive always imagines he's restraining himself from doing something terribly dramatic and possibly socially unacceptable.

When the man leaves Ned flips the sign from 'open' to 'closed' in one slow reluctant movement.

Flies

The view out of the Pie Hole window is not a happy one.

Olive wants to close the blinds, but she won't, she can't. She thinks maybe they need to see what's going on out there.

A cloud of flies chases the sparse collection of pedestrians still outside up the street, a giant streaming cape of tiny winged insects that are managing a truly disturbing level of threat.

Someone wheels close to the window, only to spin away again, arms flailing. The steady droning hum is audible through the glass.

The Pie Hole is not so much a delicious pastry and fruit establishment today as it is a bunker away from the B-movie currently going on outside.

"I don't like this, I don't like this at all." Olive pours coffee for a woman who hasn't taken her eyes off of the scene going on outside. The cup rattles when she lifts it. She spills as much as she drinks, Olive mops it up without a word, then drifts over to the booth that Ned, Chuck and Emerson are currently folded into.

Emerson has the paper open at a story involving the cryogenic suspension of several disgustingly rich but terminally ill members of society. They're trying to decide if freezing them before actual death occurred is murder.

"What are you talking about?"

"Nothing," Chuck says through a smile.

"Nothing," Ned says, through an expression of horrific and terrible guilt.

Emerson glares at anything close enough to be glared at.

Olive squishes herself into the booth beside him.

"I was lured over by your super-secret hush-hush conversation, which you're having just far enough away that I can't follow it but just close enough for me to catch a tantalising word or so," she admits.

"We weren't having a secret conversation," Ned says flatly, in that way he does when he's lying.

"We were briefly talking about secret things but we're finished now," Chuck allows and smiles up at Olive in a way that's friendly but still ever so slightly secretive. It's a party Olive hasn't been invited to and she makes a noise through her nose and pretends she's not upset about that.

"So, ignoring your secret society for a minute, what the hell is going on?"

"I don't know, I thought it was just here, but it seems to be-" Chuck gestures at the paper, the headline suggests that the strange spread of plagues isn't confined to them, it isn't even confined to America.

"Maybe we're being punished for daring to try and raise people from the dead," Olive says, half looking at the story Emerson's still reading.

"Why, why, why would you say that?" Ned's eyes have widened to startled accusation. Which Olive thinks is an unnecessary over-reaction and tries to convey as much with her dubious wry mouth quirk of 'gee, that over-reaction to my otherwise harmless observation sure is curious.'

But that just makes 'startled' flick over into 'hunted,' which is interesting, very interesting.

Now they're doing the staring thing, the pointed staring, the 'go away so we can talk about stuff that you don't know about' staring.

She tries to look like she's exasperated rather than hurt.

Diseased livestock

Two days later at the Coeur d’Coeurs Animal Husbandry Extravaganza the situation goes from bad to worse, or rather from bad to more disturbing.

Chuck pats Maisy the cow, last year's winner of the blue ribbon, she's clearly now suffering from something insidious and debilitating-

-as are most of her bovine friends.

She's sweating and trembling, unsteady on her feet and covered in small unpleasant sores. Her stomach rumbles in quiet misery.

"Blood, frogs, lice, flies, and now this. I'm sensing a pattern, and I'm not happy about it." Emerson doesn't look happy about it, at all. He's far past his usual regular brand of unhappiness- that's more a cynical mistrust of the world in general. This is an unhappiness that rolls off him in waves.

Chuck can feel the waves of unhappiness if she stands close enough.

"You think some crazy maniac is recreating the ten plagues?" Chuck peers at him over the top of her oversized sunglasses.

"It makes more sense than the alternative," Ned says quietly. His arms are folded in tightly, making him one narrow line of unhappiness.

"What's the alternative?"

"We're being punished." His voice is edging into mournful.

"We are not being punished."

Maisy makes an unhappy digestive noise, and they all take a step back.

"I think Maisy would probably disagree with you," Emerson says flatly.

Boils

It takes two days for the disturbing sickness of the animals to turn into a disturbing sickness of the people. Chuck and Olive watch cautiously through the Pie Hole windows as the world continues to suffer.

"That man definitely looks like he has some sort of plague!" Olive says, from somewhere underneath Chuck's arm.

"Boils, it's boils." Ned supplies from where he's pointedly not looking out of any of the windows. He's sweeping the floor instead, with rather more enthusiasm than it probably requires. What with it looking fairly clean already.

"Oh that's just nasty." Olive wrinkles her nose. Only to spot Ned and Chuck's expressions. "Nasty for them obviously, poor people."

Emerson grunts.

"As long as they're nasty out there." He's refusing to look out of the window. Possibly for fear that he'll be put off his pie.

"It seems cruel to deny the afflicted tasty pie when they may be feeling especially in need of it," Chuck's words are sympathetic, but her expression through the glass is closer to quiet horror. Not the sort of face that you'd want to lure you in for tasty pie.

"Due to the hideous facial disfigurements?" Emerson interjects.

"Don't call them hideous." Chuck's voice is gently chastising.

"Hideous is a matter of personal opinion, and that just happens to be my personal opinion on the matter." Emerson sniffs and turns another page of his paper. Which bears a headline which involves the words -IS NIGH. Olive doesn't need to be a genius to work out what words are under the crumpled paper beneath Emerson's hand. "Besides, I'd rather have them hideously disfigured out there than hideously disfigured in here, in my face."

Ned makes miserable noises and goes about his sweeping with a level of unhappiness that verges on flagellation.

"Ned," Chuck says gently. "It's not your fault."

"What's not his fault?" Olive asks from where she's perched on the edge of the booth seats.

Everyone clams up, then attempts to look innocent with varying degrees of success.

Olive sets her 'determined stare' on them all, but no one breaks. It's very disappointing.

"Fine, be like that! I'll go back to the pies, where I'm wanted."

Ned and Chuck both try and call her back, but she's too cross to be soothed by apologies and pretty smiles.

Far too cross.

Thunder and Hail

"I can't help but feel I'm responsible in some way for the impending apocalypse," Ned says quietly, and it feels strangely terrifying admitting to it out loud. Because admitting to it makes it feel real, and that's not something he needs right now.

"It's not an apocalypse."

Thunder chooses that exact moment to rattle the Pie Hole with what feels like the entire fury of heaven. Rain hits the window so hard it looks like one constant wave.

Then, as if to make absolutely certain the weather has their attention, lightening rips through the darkness, briefly illuminating the terrified faces that hurry past.

"If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck," Emerson says pointedly. Ned sinks in the booth, a quiet dejected deflation, worthy of world-destroyers everywhere.

"You didn't cause the apocalypse. Emerson, tell him!"

Emerson makes his 'like hell I will' face.

"Emerson!" Chuck's valiantly trying strident protest, which Ned finds bolstering. Though there's a good chance it will be ultimately useless in the face of Emerson having already made his mind up.

"I didn't say a word."

"You didn't have to!"

The power goes off then, leaving them in blackness cut through with the occasional flash of lightening.

There's a long pause full of words that aren't being said.

Emerson eventually decides to say some of them.

"I'm just saying, if it turns out that you are the anti-christ-"

Ned lets his head fall forward into his cupped hands.

Locusts

Olive gets to Lily and Vivian's house just as the cloud that followed her all the way pours locusts over everything in its path. She pushes the door shut and leans back against it, breathes relief up into her hair. She does wonder what kind of madness had made her come here today, when the weather report earlier declared today as being 'cloudy, with an eighty percent chance of locusts.'

The clatter-splat of the swarm hitting the walls and windows is louder than it has any right to be.

The door jumps under her shoulders, and she gives a little yelp of fear.

"Olive." Vivian slides down the stairs, all fragile lines of relief.

She steers Olive away from the wood that's groaning under the weight of a thousand locusts, and over to the sofa.

"You shouldn't have come all this way; it's dangerous to be out there."

Lily is over by the windows, she has her shotgun balanced on one arm, like she expects looters- though judging by the tightening and relaxing of her fingers she'd be grateful of some looters. This, this is just unnatural.

She grunts a greeting at Olive and leaves the window to make herself another drink.

"It's the end of the goddamn world," Lily says roughly, and shoves a drink into Olive's hand. Olive makes a noise that has something of a flavour of surrender about it, and pours it down her throat without looking at it. She's forced into a surprised noise when it proves itself an apocalypse-appropriate flavour of alcohol rather than Lily's usual.

"Lily, don't say such things," Vivian admonishes, half rebuke and half quiet unease.

"Why the hell not, it's no use sticking our heads in the sand."

Vivian seems tempted to protest that statement, but she's very carefully not looking at the windows.

Lily saves her by grunting and crossing the room.

"I'm having another martini. I'm having two."

Olive tries a smile, though for the first time in a really long time it feels like it fits wrong on her face.

"I'm sure it's not the end of the world, I'm sure everything will be fine-"

Lily makes a rude snorting noise, and Vivian's expression is quiet sympathy, like you'd give to a happily deluded child. Though it slips quickly into sad foreboding, like she thinks maybe the world outside might already have become barren wilderness.

If Olive is honest, she doesn't entirely disagree with either of them. For the first time Lily's bitter cynicism is the more comforting. As the world seems to be, at the moment, disappearing under plague and the battle formations of insect kind.

Like putting your head down and hanging onto something might be the last sensible thing to do.

A cheery disposition only gets you so far when the sky is falling, after all.

A shower of insects hits the windows, making Vivian jump and Lily's mouth snarl up at the edges. It sends the room briefly dark.

"Goddamn bugs." Lily's fingers tighten on wood, like she might shoot them through the glass.

Instead she pours Vivian a drink and pushes it into her startled hands.

Vivian stares at it, expression poised somewhere between bewildered and helpless.

"Might as well not let it go to waste."

After a long moment of stillness Vivian drinks it.

Lily's blinking, like she honestly didn't expect that.

Olive thinks maybe it is the end of the world after all.

Darkness

Olive has been quiet for a very, very long time.

Or perhaps it's only been a few seconds. Ned's not entirely sure. But it feels like a long time, it feels like too much time, an over-long pause that crawls over his skin like a tiny, painless and continual, electric shock made of sweaty, terrified anticipation.

"Please say something," Ned says quickly. "Because honestly, waiting for you to say something is probably worse- almost definitely worse than you actually saying something. Even if it's something horrible, because then at least I'm not imagining all the horrible things you could say."

He takes a breath.

"From the dead?" Olive says carefully.

Ned nods, just in case speaking will release another terrifying slew of words and nervousness. "From the dead, so they can talk and move and walk and everything."

"Like zombies?"

"No, no- there's no zombie-ness, no, there's no- not zombies; that would be disturbing."

Olive raises an eyebrow, and Ned suspects she's querying his use of the word disturbing considering the context of their conversation.

"Not like zombies, just like, one moment they're dead and the next...not dead?"

Chuck chooses that moment to appear over the counter like a jack in the box- like a Chuck in the box.

Olive gives a little half-shriek of surprise which Ned also chooses to feel guilty for.

"Have you told her yet?" Chuck asks, bare elbows balanced in the clean spaces.

Ned just makes his awkward face.

"That's a yes, isn't it?" Chuck looks at Olive, as if she can spot the new knowledge somewhere in her hair.

Olive looks at Chuck, really looks at her.

"You were really dead?" she asks, quietly, curiously. "You didn't fake it, you were actually dead, and buried?"

"Not quite buried, it was something of a last minute rescue." Chuck's smile opens up like she can't help it. "And I was murdered."

Olive's brain train is obviously derailed completely by that piece of information.

"Oh my god, that's horrible. Did you find the-?"

Chuck nods.

"And he's-?"

Chuck nods again.

"He came back and Lily shot him." Chuck doesn't even pretend not to be grateful of the fact.

"Good, wow, getting revenge on your own murderer, or at least being around to witness it. There's a very poetic justice sort of thing to that, I like that. Vengeance from beyond the grave." Olive leans against the counter and nods, like she approves.

After the grave, in fact, Ned thinks to himself.

"Good for you."

Olive looks at Emerson.

"Were you dead too?"

He immediately looks offended.

"Do I look dead?"

"I don't know, she didn't look dead." Olive points at Chuck in defence, who's doing an amazing job of not looking dead right at that very moment in time. Which Ned is thankful for every single day, often more than once.

"I'm not dead," Emerson continues, mouth pulled down in annoyance.

"Sure, not now."

"I was never dead." Emerson gets a handful of Ned's jaw and shakes it meaningfully, ignoring Ned's grumbled 'ow.'

"Could I do that if I was dead?"

"Well ok then, I'm sorry, but someone left me off the party invitations list and I'm kind of catching up."

Ned doesn't manage not to look embarrassed about that, and thus even more awkward, a sort of folding motion that he knows his height makes even more pointed.

It almost pushes Olive into something sympathetic - but no, she sticks to her guns, puts her hands on her hips even. Ned is both grateful every day for her particular brand of stubbornness and ever so slightly terrified of it.

"I'm not happy about all the secrecy. I'm not a delicate flower; I can handle a little 'bringing people back from the dead,' you know. Geesh, and quite frankly I'm a little mad that you waited until the apocalypse to tell me!"

There's a long and fairly awkward silence, which Olive clearly isn't going to apologise for. She seems to feel everyone should suffer through it; which Ned decides, all things considered, is probably fair.

But then Olive's expression tilts sideways, like she's suddenly looking at something from a different angle.

"That's why you've been so worried, isn't it? You think you caused this somehow, you think you're doing this, all this crazy end-of-the-world stuff."

Ned flinches, which manages to gain him the undivided attention of everyone in the room.

Chuck looks so sad.

Olive looks determined. She shakes her head, like she's refusing to accept it.

"Oh Ned, you couldn't destroy the world. No matter how many people you did, or didn't-" she looks pointedly at Emerson. "-bring back from the dead."

"You should listen to her, Olive is a very clever woman," Chuck says seriously.

"Damn right I am."

There's a moment of silence.

Olive nudges Emerson with an elbow and he sighs.

"The way I see it, even if it was your eventual fate to destroy the world and everything in it, there isn't a hell of a lot you could have done about it." He stops, rolls his eyes and then grumbles something under his breath which Ned doesn't catch, but it makes Chuck laugh and hug him.

Emerson suffers through it manfully.

Ned would have really loved a hug too.

Chuck catches his eye and grins at him, and he decides that's almost good enough.

The mood feels very momentous to Ned, like it's balancing on the edge of...something, and he's a little afraid of what waits on the other side...

Until Chuck slips close enough to put the dark glasses on Olive.

"Come and watch the eclipse with me!" Chuck grasps Olive's wrist and starts pulling her in the direction of the street.

"You're sprightly for a dead girl, you know that!"

Flood

The Pie Hole is quiet.

Businesses have been shut for days.

"The death of the first born," Ned says quietly into his folded arms. "That's what comes next."

"We're all screwed," Olive says bluntly.

"We would have heard about it by now, if people just suddenly started dropping dead. We would have heard about it, it's something else, something...more." Chuck can't for the life of her turn her quiet frustration into answers.

"All this is coming from somewhere," Emerson says flatly. "Fantastic detective that I may be, I'm not often asked to divine the minds of supernatural beings determined to destroy us all. I realise the circumstances we work under don't exactly make us run-of-the-mill citizens, but I'm at a loss here."

"Well, everything seems to be coming in from the coast," Olive says absently.

There's a moment of perfect stillness where Chuck thinks that maybe, just maybe she can hear all their brains working at once.

"It's going to end in flood," she says quietly.

Olive's mouth is open. Ned's face is a picture of surprise verging on horror.

"To the roof!" Chuck says seriously, and with a handful of Emerson and Olive and an enthusiastic gesture for Ned they move in a group towards the stairs.

The facts were these....

Forewarned, and therefore forearmed with the knowledge of an impending deluge, they alighted to the roof. The Pie Maker, Chuck, Olive, Emerson Cod and Digby.

To watch the water crash in from a position of majesty, and relative safety.

And to wait for whatever came after.