If this were a story, and Toby were reading it, he would have long since given up reading in disgust for cliché it is. In how many movies has he seen this scenario? Or rather, refused to see. It's not like he enjoyed the idea even before he found himself living it.
"I don't like guns," he informed Gideon the first time the other man offered one to him. He tried not to think about Rosslyn, and even less about his father.
"I don't like them either," Gideon agreed. "They're very easily misused. But you won't always be able to rely on mine to defend you."
"I'll use a machete," Toby retorted. "At least I can be sure of killing one if I cut off its head. Bullets don't stop these things without a direct fatal shot."
"True. But how good are you with a machete? Have you ever sliced right through someone's neck, with all the bone and muscle and sinew? It's tougher than it looks. Not to mention using a machete requires you to get closer to one than a gun does."
Absolutely surreal, Toby thought at the time. I'm having an argument about the best way to kill a zombie. Josh and Sam would have got a kick out of this.
He hasn't seen Josh and Sam in years, but knowing them, they're still out there. Josh and Sam are survivors -- even if he can imagine Josh using a gun even less than he can himself.
They met in a diner in New York, he and Gideon. The city was almost deserted, people leaving the vast urban areas for the rural, and the diner was a brief place of refuge. A dozen people gathered there, most panicking and Gideon coolly taking charge. Toby helped, and shared a glance with Gideon across sentries and spread blankets, and from then on they stuck together.
They've stayed in New York, in that diner, helping refugees, though every morning when he wakes up, Toby tells himself he's going to leave. A city that should have been so vibrant and bustling is now just a drying husk, a monument to the death of civilization rather than a symbol of its progress. Once it had been more home to him than DC, but it isn't any longer.
And still he stays. He's not sure why. The world has become such a stranger.
He doesn't know why Gideon was in New York. He doesn't know why Gideon stays with him now, beyond companionship. He doesn't even know if Gideon is his first name or his last.
What he knows is that Gideon is there, and teaches him to shoot a gun with accuracy, and has stubble that burns wonderfully across Toby's skin and reminds him of how alive he is, they both are, in this chaotic madhouse of a world that he'd once tried so hard to make better. He'd had such big ideas, but now he can only save one or two souls at a time. If he even manages that. But he tries not to dwell on the times he was too late.
Otherwise, he knows little of who Gideon was, or even who he is now. They talk so little beyond practical matters. Where to find more food, more bullets, to store the back-up machete Toby insists they keep, just in case, because he's sure he can bring himself to chop through a neck if really pushed to it.
--
"Come in, come in," Toby grumbles to the newest bedraggled pair as they rush through the door, Gideon slamming it closed behind them. Two women, one with hair just like Andy's. But he doesn't think about that. He's making coffee.
Over in a corner booth, Gideon engages one of the newcomers in a game of chess. Toby stopped playing with him not long into their association, tired of losing and then having Gideon quietly offer another game. He's better at poker anyway.
He makes coffee, as he did yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. As he will tomorrow, he knows. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time. Shakespeare had it right. Once he was adviser to a president, and now that means nothing.
Now he just makes coffee, and has sex with Gideon in a sleeping bag behind the counter, and the speeches he writes are for his mind alone. He does his best to listen to every wandering soul's sob story, except it's hard to drum up much sympathy when the world is a wretched muckball and he has no idea where Huck and Molly are.
He shoots zombies, and sometimes manages to hit them in the head or in the heart, and wonders that he doesn't feel more triumphant when they don't get up again.
"I thought zombies were supposed to be the reanimated dead," Toby complained once to Gideon. "Why do bullets stop them at all? They're not even really zombies!"
"Does it matter?" Gideon replied. "What we call them is just semantics. The word doesn't matter."
Words are the only things that do, Toby thought but did not say. He complained from force of habit, but was too tired to keep up an argument once it started.
It doesn't feel like they're living their lives. It feels like they're in a holding pattern, stuck waiting for something momentous to happen. Waiting for the zombies to all drop down properly dead. Waiting for the military or the scientists or the doctors to finally find a cure. Waiting for a miracle.
Waiting for Godot, who never comes.
Still Toby can't help but feel like he's waiting, rather than existing. He still has hope, no matter how much sometimes he wants to pluck out its feathers and kick it out of his soul.
--
Jason Gideon had not thought there could be anything worse than staying in the BAU until the zombies came. Now he knows that no matter what he tries, the end result will always be the same thing, whether he's dealing with the living or the living dead, whether they want to devour his mind metaphorically or literally.
He pushes his rock up the hill and up the hill and up the hill, but cannot find happiness in it.