poly_chromatic | (no subject)

She's dimly aware that she's lost long before the world, the woods, solidify around her, strange and sharp-edged; before the smell of smoke overtakes the cool earthiness of someone else's half-remembered, half-imagined evening.

If she knew this was a dream-- and she doesn't, not yet, lulled into unquestioning acceptance of her unusual circumstances by the impossible flexibility of dream logic-- she'd know it was not her own. She's never dreamed of fire, not like this; but the fear she feels, old and deep and cloying, is entirely her own.

The flames flare and she's running; towards or away from the screams, she doesn't know. She's not sure what would be worse, only that she needs to move.

He slams into her, all two hundred pounds of him, half-wolf, his eyes blazing blue and not red, not alpha red, never alpha red.

He hears his voice and he feels like it's too old but that's the problem with this dream. "Laura," he says, because he's not sure, he knows it's not Laura but all women are Laura in this dream, "Laura we have to go, mom, mom's in there-"

This wasn't how it happened, but it's how it happens now.

When they collide she shouts, too startled and too wild to be properly frightened by him, torn between the impulse to grab him to keep from falling and the desire to backpedal, to pick another direction and keep going. (She's always been a runner. She always escapes, and she always goes back in the end. Maybe. That's always been the way.) She settles somewhere between, stumbling a few steps to regain her footing without fleeing.

He's talking to her, she realizes. Whatever he is.

"I'm not..." Cameron starts to protest at first, but he keeps babbling and she knows it's not worth correcting, though she doesn't understand why he can't tell. Besides, clearly it's not important. "Go where?" she asks, shaking her head which does nothing to clear it. It's too late, she remembers, without knowing what that means. "Is someone trapped?"

"Mom, and the kids, and-"

And their family. Their whole family, everyone, they're all in that house and it's burning. Now the smell is acrid and thick and burning in his nose, even though he wasn't there that day when this happened, he never saw these things, he never saw any of it.

He just saw the charred house, after.

Everyone is dying and he doesn't know what to do. He can't even find the house, he keeps looking and it's like whenever he turns the corner to find home, all that's there is more woods, different woods.

That stops her short; she looks at him, the moment stretching (at least in herr perception) with the fluidity of a dream. Wondering if she might know him. Looking for some trace of familiarity (but that would be too much to expect). It's too late, though. It has to be.

"Okay," she says, quietly, like soothing a little child, "okay. We'll go." Maybe now she isn't seeing him, not really; she keeps her eyes locked on his and reaches for his hand. There can't be anything the two of them can do; but maybe she can take him away.

His eyes are still blue, bright, and then he grabs her wrist and runs, runs like he'll find a place, somewhere, anywhere, where there will be answers. He knows there aren't any he'll like. The only answers are that Kate, Kate did this, Kate is the one who-

That's not good enough.

She keeps up.

For about a minute.

Inclined as she is to sensible shoes, even in a dream her shoes aren't sensible enough for this. Or maybe it's uncertainty foiling her footsteps so she stumbles behind him, roots seeming to rise underfoot, branches clawing at her hair. A handful of useless names sit on the tip of her tongue. Finally she stops-- tries to stop, at least-- yanking back on his arm.

"Do you really want to see?"

"I have to see," he says, it's all his fault, he has to see. She's tripping, he can tell, and he reaches to pick her up. But it doesn't matter because the woods close in on them, there's no way out of this grove.

"No!"

He's been here before, too. Frozen, unable to get out.

She'll fight that on principle, pulling away as he tries to lift her, even if it would be faster. As if there were any real destination in mind. (And the scent of it is still in the air. She's never been so close to burning buildings, certainly that's not out of her mind.)

But she stills a little-- moves closer, even-- as she perceives the change in their surroundings. The trees are too close.

"Do you know where we are?"

"I need to get out-" he snarls, attacking a tree, but then there's a laugh.

It's a woman's laugh. It's coming from every direction. It's Kate's laugh, echoing off trees and off the ground and it's pervasive and sexual, but it's threatening, too. Kate's laughing is, more than anything, threatening.

Funny, isn't it, when the wild not-quite-human-looking stranger tearing at a tree seems like the safer option.

She looks around as though there were some chance of finding the source of that awful laughter, before joining him in his attempt, tearing bare-handed at the brush between trunks.

There's nothing. They're stuck, no matter how much debris Derek pulls away, no matter how much-

And Kate's laughter is making him more tense, angry, scared, scared enough that he howls, howls for, for, for-

For Laura. For his mom, for his Uncle Peter, for someone in his family to hear him and burst through the woods laughing at him for being so scared, but he doesn't care, he doesn't care if it means that this will end.

If she knew this was a dream-- and she's starting to suspect something is off-- she'd be seriously puzzled by some of this symbolism, some of what isn't actually so symbolic at all. But that's the way she looks at things, even here. Rational by her standards of rationality.

She backs off when he howls, not that it seems threatening so much as mournful. But wide-eyed she presses her back against a tree, and wonders whether the fire's burnt out yet.

"There has to be some way-- can we climb?"

She raises her voice, but she doubts he'll hear.

He turns to look at her, and nods, and grabs her before he starts up a tree, clinging hard to the wood.

That was not quite what she had in mind; but Cameron, patron saint of contrariness, recognizes that they're out of other options. And that fighting away this time would gain her nothing but a broken neck. She might be able to climb on her own, but not so well-- and time is of the essence, that much is obvious, even if she's sure it's too late to do anything about the burning family.

So she holds on to him as tightly as she can, heart pounding.

It's not the first time he's dreamt of the woods ( not the first time this week even ) but it's the first time with the scent of fire in his human nose. He stumbles forward twigs breaking under his feet, sucks in a breath because it looks and feels real and the panic feels like a haze of danger.

Then he's shouting, "Derek?"

All that responds, at first, is a howl - Derek's howl, but these are Beacon Hills, the woods around the town, there's no denying that.

Stiles tries to find that sound, tries to figure out his way through the woods and the smoke and the crackle of burning. He just picks a direction, stumbling through it and trying not to think of the heat on his face.

"Derek."

Derek slams into him, grabbing him, his eyes wild. "You're not Laura," he says, gasping. "You're not Laura because Laura's-"

There's another howl, and then the woods aren't burning, now they're cold and still, and there's another howl. And another.

"What are you doing here?"

His hands curl in Derek's jacket, eyes wide as he hears the howling.

"I don't know."

There's another howl, and then another, and Derek reaches for Stiles, topples over him, covers him up.

"Don't listen. Don't listen, Stiles."

That's the sound of the Argents coming for us.

There's something terrifying about this - something sharp and unsettling and awful about Derek's fear. He buries his face in his jacket and holds on to him as if he could stop him from falling apart.

"Derek, I don't understand." A whisper, "Where did the fire go? What's happening?"

[Naga growls. She doesn't understand how she fell asleep on the beach and ended up in the forest, but that confusion is second to the threat she senses all around her.

She sniffs the air, trying to pin down where the fire is so she can get away from it as quickly as possible...and to make sure Korra isn't in it.]

[There's a howl - and then Derek is there, not quite running into her.]

How are you here? How did you get here?

[Naga doesn't understand his questions; even if she did, she wouldn't know the answers. But she butts her head against his shoulder, a quick sign of affection. Her hackles remain raised. Something is still very, very wrong.]

[She gets a hug, then, and Derek is burying his face in the fur of her shoulder. Something is wrong. He is trying to hide himself from that sound, from the terrible sound that doesn't stop, no matter what he does.]

[This isn't right. This isn't normal behavior for her strange friend. Naga nips gently at Derek's shoulder, trying to tug him to what she thinks might be safety.]

[She freezes in her place, the woods aren't unfamiliar, but at the same time they're disorientating, she feels turned around like and like she's crossed over her path one too many times.

The scene much too familiar and strikingly like the vague smokey memories of a life that seems so impossibly long ago and far away.

Natasha remembers the fire. She remembers the smell of it.

Her earliest, most clear memory is of fire. Hot, unforgiving, and filling the air with choking, black smoke. She remembers thinking that this is what it is like to die, alone in the dark, and unable to taste clean air.

She remembers the pleading. She remembers her mother’s voice, or what she believes is her mother’s voice, begging the soldiers who came to kill them.

The sound of the screaming makes her heart clench, she can stop it this time right? She can be the soldier at the window that saves them? Why not? The closer she gets to the sound the more it becomes clear that this isn't her fire, and somehow that's not at all comforting.

That doesn't matter, but at the very least, she can do something whether it be to save herself from the flames that stole her 'life', and robbed her of her family all those years ago, or protect someone else from suffering the same.]

Edited (ill get it right one day.) 2013-04-11 17:01 (UTC)

[All there is, to begin with, is howling.]

[Her pulse is pounding in her ears. The smell of the smoke.. it's not thick enough to choke her- but it lights some deep fear in her that she thought she'd lost a long time ago.

The howling- the sound of it, the tone is so scared and lonely, it clutches at her heart. She needs to find the source of the fire, find what ever is howling..

She needs to move, because she can't let panic hold her- she's too strong for that.]