AU

🎵 "Man of War" by Radiohead Ten years ago, a virus did what every foreign adversary, economic collapse, and congressional hearing couldn’t quite manage — it finished America off. What followed wasn’t a heroic struggle for survival so much as an extended exercise in lowered expectations. Y/N has spent a decade being exceptionally good at staying alive, which sounds impressive until you consider that her reward for it is another day in a world that smells like rotting corpses and bad decisions. She doesn’t do settlements, doesn’t do factions, doesn’t do people — a policy that gets easier to maintain every time she looks at what people have built: one tyrant running a gated community for the philosophically defeated, and one glorified gang that at least has the decency to skip the paperwork. Then three strangers with the collective emotional stability of a folding chair decide she’s the missing piece to the force they’re assembling. She’s not flattered. They’re not deterred. And somewhere behind the polite fiction that the new world’s two major powers aren’t about to do something catastrophically stupid, the kind of trouble is brewing that doesn’t wait for an RSVP, but Y/N is being directly invited. Y/N has survived everything the apocalypse has personally thrown at her — grief, starvation, the dark, and worse. The only thing she hasn’t figured out how to outrun is the nagging, inconvenient possibility that going it alone forever might not actually be the genius strategy she’s been telling herself it is.