Quilt was bored, bored out of her mind.

She had always lived an active life. She had trained to be a nurse directly out of school, and after a decade on the wards had fallen out and into district nursing, doing agency work on the side.

She had always considered going back into hospital work, but had never gotten around to it. She missed the camaraderie and the business of it, but she didn't miss the pay, or the racism. At least out in the community she had a regular set of clients, and she could pass on those whom she didn't get along with. Or who didn't get along with her.

When she wasn't working, she had been hanging out with friends at the pubs and clubs, going on holiday, or more rarely, reading. She had been considering training to be a midwife, it was only a two-year course.

She had been on three dates, in the month before the End. None of them had come out to anything, but she didn't mind. She enjoyed the process of the dates, the rush of getting to know somebody, but she didn't enjoy the longer prospects so much.

Still, she had made some good friends, and it was always good to keep your options open. To expand your mind, and meet people from different social circles.

But here, there was nothing. No people, no pubs, no bars and no work. She didn't even have books.

God help her, she was getting into gardening, that was how far she had fallen. Her, who couldn't even raise a houseplant. Sure, they had to do it because without they'd starve, and they'd somehow managed to rustle up seeds and get some starter plants going, because that was apparently what you did when gardening, but it was absolutely not her scene.

She had also tried knitting, Shim had shown her how to use the sewing machine, and Rust had given her a whetstone and all of the gardening equipment and let her go wild, but while it filled a couple of hours, none of it was interesting. There was no stimulation there.

Even the arrival of the little wildcat didn't do much to spice it up. She mostly hovered about until they let her leave in the morning, and then tracked mud in again at night. She didn't speak, and her emotional responses were muted to a frightening degree, although she was getting a little more open as time went on.

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Quilt had considered following her a couple of times, seeing where she went, or even asking to tag along, but there had never been a good moment to ask.

She wouldn't let any of them near her, that much they had found out early on. She didn't like being woken up in the mornings if she'd slept in, and getting a positive response to any question was like pulling teeth. The only way to interact with her was to ignore her as best you could, which did not make for an interesting relationship.

She was mostly just another mouth to feed, although Quilt suspected that she might have helped with the house and garden if asked in the right way, as she had started collecting the eggs for them in the mornings.

She sighed again, so very bored. The weather had settled into 'late spring, early summer' over the past couple of weeks, and the chickens were making the most of it. She watched as they scratched up the yard and tried to find a way through the fence to the newly planted vegetable garden.

She had also made the most of it, for a while, sunbathing in various places, but you could only be on holiday for so long before you wanted to go home

She had even, at one point, traipsed all the way back to her old apartment, hoping to find the book from her Day, but it hadn't been there. Nothing had. Where her apartment had been there was only an empty room, the white curtains flapping in the breeze.

It had freaked her out a little. She hadn't told the other two, but the thought that it was simply gone, that the place she had been found or born, that she had defined, the place that was so much her that it had come with her even after death, was gone. What did that mean for her?

She had stood there for a long time, staring at the empty room, and then she had left.

As she descended, there had been vines growing up the stairs and shoots pushing their way through the cracks in the walls. The concrete steps had been slippery with algae, and birds were flying in and out through the broken windows.

She hated it.

Maybe somebody who wasn't her would have found it beautiful. They would have spoken in poetic verse about the beauty of the green, about the plumage of the birds and the metaphorical bullshit of a world returning to nature. They would have written songs, whittled a guitar from twigs, become an unknown star.

She hated it.

She wanted bars, she wanted libraries, she wanted clean concrete. She wanted human spaces, maintained by human people, who would serve her a drink and show her to a nice clean table, where a human person she didn't know awaited her.

She wanted to go to human houses, along well-maintained and human-sized streets. She wanted to stand in peoples living rooms and see to the sores on their legs, on their arses, in their minds.

Instead, all she had was nature, and her and nature had never been friends.

Rust and Shim seemed to both be thriving, and the wildcat was neither here nor there, but her, she just wasn't built for this.

She wanted to go home.