< ☆ Location: Sheriff's Offices ☆ > - Blog Posts

Lucas looks up and sees a girl standing at the front desk. She looks lost and scared.

"Hi," he greets, walking over and chuckling. "I am, and yes, we do. We even have a couple of deputies if you can believe it. But it's just me today. How can I help you?"

He stands with his hands behind him, polite and non-threatening, so he doesn't scare her.

nowhere county jail, lucas. @patroclusblossom

Catie steps in. The place feels wrong in ways she can't quite place, but it’s the sheriff’s office, she figures, and she has no idea what else to do. She’d been walking for what felt like hours, the streets of Oblitus starting to blur in her mind.

She’s about to turn around, maybe head back outside and try to wrap her head around any of this, when she sees Lucas.

He’s young, maybe a few years older than her, with dark hair that’s a little too messy for someone in law enforcement. Catie pauses, her thoughts scrambling to form a coherent sentence. 'You're the sheriff?' Her words come out a little sharper than she intends, and she realises she sounds like she’s questioning the whole damn idea. 'This place… actually has a sheriff?'

where: sheriff offices when: utp whom: @purgatored Elm

Lucas walks into his office and sets the glass of water in front of Elm.

"Alright," he says, sitting in the chair next to her. He pulls the tape recorder closer and gives her a small smile. "You okay if I record this? That way, I don't have to ask you the details over and over again."

He makes sure to keep his posture casual and open, looking and leaning toward her, not crossing any limbs. He also makes sure not to crowd her space.

Lucas looks up and smiles at Ana, which quickly turns to a grimace at the mention of Cameron. Lucas has heard all about that rocky relationship, and he knows even making sure the town is okay isn't enough to fully distract from that.

"At least she's still here. Not everyone got so lucky. We found Kina and... yeah, I'm gonna check up on Rae later."

He looks back down at the supplies.

"We're okay for now. I just don't know how best to ration anything in case something like this happens again. Is it too much to ask for a semi-truck full of survival supplies to come into town?"

He gives a weak chuckle at the old joke they've shared probably a hundred times in the years since he became a sheriff.

The sky feels too bright for what last night was. It shouldn’t be this quiet, this deceptively calm. Anastasia pulls her coat tighter, as if that could keep out the weight of exhaustion. Her hands still smell faintly of rain and the damp clothes she sorted, her mind circling back to Cameron more times than she’d like. She finds Lucas by the sheriff’s post, bent over a table littered with supplies—medical kits, rope, lantern oil. Seeing his familiar face pulls a tired smirk from her, brief and fleeting. “Hey,” she says, stepping up beside him. She breathes out slowly, "I just came from Colony House." Her words are low but steady, like it’s a confession that only Lucas can hear. "Saw Cameron." She waits a beat, rubbing a hand over her face as the memory settles like stones in her gut. "It went... like it always does." Her voice softens, brushing against old wounds. "She’s holding it together. But she's fine, thankfully." The silence between her and Lucas is easy, a quiet understanding built over years of shared burdens. She glances down at the supplies, her gaze flickering across the bottles and bandages with the detached focus of someone always on edge. “How bad is it? I know we lost some people... How're we on supplies?” she asks finally, her voice edged with exhaustion. @patroclusblossom