i'm a lonely boy

- - - - WARM BODIES - - - -

The New Hunger - Bad Life Choices
(R/Ryan is a human survivor in a pre-The New Hunger world)
Doomsday doesn't hit with a world-stopping bang. It's a lot of little big things: layoffs, more and more schools shutting down, North Korea finally gets the balls to attack South Korea and gas shoots past seven bucks a gallon. Hostess; gone. Blockbuster already went the way of the dinosaur.

Ryan thinks it can't get any worse...


Warm Bodies - Spreading the Word
(R travels with Julie post-canon; he's captured by another city's group)
He'd like to say he took the crowbar to the face like a champ, shrugged it off.

The reality is R crumpled to the ground like a sack of meat, stunned, and by the time he came to again, he had a blindfold tied around his head, handcuffs around his wrists and no idea where Julie was. Jesus. A trail of blood has trickled from his nose in the meantime, pooling in his mouth as he tries to catch his breath behind his kidnappers, the coppery taste coating his tongue. This wasn't supposed to happen. They were supposed to bring the news of the Cure (or whatever you wanted to call) it to the other cities, they'd hold hands, and it would spread like the best kind of disease. General Grigio had grunted he had a bad case of "rainbows and unicorns" before they left the other day.

Maybe he was right.

- - - - THE LAST OF US - - - -
Banished
(R/Ryan is AUed to be a human survivor in The Last of Us post-game)
Ryan's lived this long, found some good people to live with who didn't look like they'd murder him for his shoes and thought he'd settled down. He was gonna ask Carley out. And...now he's bitten. Screwed doesn't even cover it. It was a death sentence from the moment he felt pain blossom in his thigh, even before he smashed the Infected's forehead in with a hammer and felt spittle and blood fly into his face.

Stupid. Should've checked the outhouse first.

UEC's Homecoming
(R/Ryan and Julie AUed into The Last of Us, early outbreak, a few months in)
With the whole CBI thing going on the coasts, they've been beefing up security. What the University of Colorado calls "preventative measures", Ryan calls "job opportunity". There's no demand for Comp Lit majors these days but apparently if you're stupidly tall and you look like you could handle a gun, you're in. The fact that his mom's a retired cop from Houston might have something to do with passing the interview.

He'll take what he can get. He can't be picky.

Ryan's only gone shooting on a range a few times - he's never thought seriously about shooting a moving target.