What a mess they had all gotten into. All that was going on around him was not the thing that he had expected to deal with at any time; a rampant sickness that was easily smelt out as it was seen in the eyes and bodies of those that had it. The seizures, the coughing, the chills and the fevers. It was disturbing to say in the least, very upsetting for someone who didn't have the answers for anything. What was it? Where had it come from? Why was it targeting them one by one? Of course, maybe it wasn't targeting them one by one, so far it had only affected those that he knew had come over the mountain. Ahren and his son, and then Laruku.



Which left him thinking as he took another long drink from a bottle, did they all have it? Laruku had said it seemed like everyone there had come from over the mountain. Maybe it was just that region's way of dealing with everyone new that had invaded it, like some twisted movie plot in a film few would see because it sounded stupid. Maybe it was in the plants, maybe it was in the air. Maybe it was even in the water that they drank. Laurel didn't have any answers and he didn't like not having some sort of way to comfort himself. But that was where the alcohol simply came in where had come in before.



Eventually, the day would simply cancel out, it wouldn't matter any more. His thoughts would mostly disjoint and go to pieces and eventually his body would feel as numb as he wanted to be. Then it would be easy to sleep, but not so pleasant to wake to. Either way, he had lost count of just how many bottles he had flung around instead of keeping them together. He had been through the camp site, he had been out on the fringes of the territory, and at some point hadn't even been in it at all until he had found a brook that ran back to the lake. And so there he was, somehow still standing while the world was seamlessly split in two through his eyes.

Nikita was quite aware of their little epidemic — mainly because she had a case of it herself. She had restricted herself to drinking only water once she had gotten sick, and that was powerfully hard to keep to. But she did it. Something disturbing that she had to force herself to do was to eat. She didn’t seem to get hungry anymore — she only went straight to weakness that came from nothing in your stomach. The female coyote was very angry at how her body was betraying her, especially in the threshold of a new life here in Esper Hollow. It wasn’t making settling in any easier. And, as she drained her fifth bottle of water today and considered getting more, she figured that she might as well distract herself with something. She swallowed — the action painful down her dry throat — and coughed a few times before hauling herself to her feet and meandering back towards the main camp.


She knew that Laurel was pretty distraught about the spreading sickness, but perhaps her own illness had shielded her eyes from the full view of it. Now, however, she could really tell. Neither she nor Laurel were really picky when it came to any sort of alcohol — it seemed to disappear at a remarkable rate when they were around — but they normally had the mind to not get completely wasted on it. She could remember that Laurel mostly only got in such a state when he was having a great time with some good friends, or was in a pit of stress. Circumstances now would point, obviously, to the latter option. Steeling herself in to go and talk to him, she tried her hardest to erase all obvious signs of sickness from her face, from her body. She made herself stand up taller, focused her eyes, and set her jaw strongly. If she had to suffer, she could do so herself; him worrying wouldn’t help.


The female were-coyote approached quietly, only announcing her presence once she was close enough to reach up and place a hand on his shoulder. She wanted to get closer, of course, but she was more afraid of getting him sick. Not that that could keep her totally away. “I do not envy you in the morning,” she murmured, her voice rough despite her efforts. It was obvious of his condition, not only from the way he stood and the expression on his face, but his general attitude. Plus the smell of booze helped, too. Nevertheless, sometimes she thought she knew him too well. She smiled faintly. She doubted he envied how she felt now, though. It might be an equal trade-off.

Sickness was in the air around him. It had to be, he had to be breathing it in with every breath just like he could smell it on the breath of those he had been around. They were all very in-tune creatures, they understood what one another was experiencing through simple methods. Sight, sound, smell; what was how he simply knew things were not very well. The alcohol had eaten away his senses a long time ago, leaving him fairly vulnerable to anything that wanted to crawl right up to him and take a hunk of flesh out of him. But Nikita wasn't some blood-hungry creature that belonged to the night and he had a sudden understanding why he had been feeling that sickness in the air around him. Her hand on his shoulder reminded him just how grounded to the earth he was at that moment, and his stillness waned.



“I don't envy anyone right now,” he said with momentary clarity. While he was able to turn his head to look at her, it was hard to keep the focus on her. Just like his fading grip with reality, the sudden turn of everything put him a little off balance and he simply decided to sink to the ground out of her touch. It was easier to sit than stand at that point anyway and the earth wasn't trying to move all over the place. Of course, he wasn't sitting very long before he simply decided it was even easier to lie on the ground, one hand still clutching the neck of the bottle like it was a lifesaver. Peering up at her from where she was, he squinted.



“You… you've got it too.” Didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that, but he was an astrophysicist tonight. “That blonde guy, uh, Jasper's dad,” he said, patting the ground with his free hand as if it would make the name come to him, “he's sick too now, I think. Said if his kid dies I get to pay for it or some shit like that. Funny huh?” Oh yeah, really funny, funny enough that he was smiling without knowing. At that point though, his hand traded the bottle and he held it up to her tiredly. “Want some?”

She stared intently into his similarly-colored eyes when he turned his attention to her — searching for any emotion, anything that might spare her any information on his thoughts. But all she could see was the haze of alcohol, clouding his mind clear through to his brain. She found her face creasing into a grim mask; Niki hadn’t expected them to be in such low spirits so early in their stay here in Esper Hollow. It was at this time that he, without warning, sank to the ground. Her hand dropped from his shoulder, and she then crossed her arms as he lie down; she watched him the whole time, making sure he wasn’t about to pass out or something. Nope, he seemed still conscious. Perhaps his life-or-death grip on that bottle was keeping him holding on to awareness. She sighed and then sank down to sit by him — though not close enough to where like she felt like she’d infect him or something.


The coyote shrugged at Laurel’s accusation; it wasn’t like she could deny it. “I’ve been worse,” she muttered, a pretty pointless stab at defending herself. She listened as he talked, her eyes never leaving him, before bitterly murmuring, “Hilarious.” Blonde guy… They had a blonde guy? Sure, she knew who Jasper was, but she hadn’t met his father before. She thought she had smelled him around, though — same with a few others that weren’t of the group but were still lingering around in the area. She hadn’t pursued them yet because she thought that they were guests enough. “Doesn’t make sense, though. Especially if the kid brought it to all of us.” She couldn’t blame any of them for being sick, but she could get angry at them for threatening the leaders about it. It wasn’t like they could wave magic wands and clear the sickness up. Sometimes she wouldn’t understand others’ logic.


Her olive eyes blithely stared at his small smile and then to the offered bottle. She frowned. Though it was completely out-of-character, the thought of the burn of alcohol along with her parched throat was completely appalling. “Strange as it is, no,” she said, her shoulders slumping slightly. Turning down booze? She must be really, really sick. “I’ve sworn to just water until I’m better, I’m afraid.”

His arm fell back to earth when she declined, the bottle unhappily grinding against the grit of the sand as he simply forgot all about setting it with ease. Not that the tempered glass would have broke, but the sound even sounded resigned in his ears. “World don't make sense,” he slurred quietly, because right now it made absolutely no sense to him at all. Everything that could have gone wrong had gone wrong. Well, almost everything. “I need to find that map Zephyr had, find out if they named this place Murphy's Law,” he said firmly, “and then I'm going to find Murphy, and I'm gonna punch that cocksucker square in the nose.” After being a gravedigger, of course, because they'd have to find his corpse first. Laurel reckoned someone else had done more than just socked him.



But then he decided to rather abruptly change the subject. “So what happens if you don't get better?” What would happen if he got sick too? So far he had tried to avoid large amounts of contact with those who were definitely sick and for the most part, Nikita didn't seem too bad. How long had Jasper been sick? How long had they been exposed to it before he had gotten really bad? It seemed like whatever they all had (or were getting) struck hard and fast, it incapacitated them easily. “Maybe it's in the water or the air,” he said, deciding then just how much he wanted to close his eyes and wish everything was a dream right about them. Things would have been nice if it was just some trippy shitfaced dream.

She nodded, a grim-looking smile appearing like a ghost on her face, as she hugged her knees close to her and then rested her chin on her arms. Surely she thought of this little plague that they had as a small setback — it certainly wasn’t the apocalypse or something (or maybe it was, and they just didn’t know yet). Nikita had believed that they would get over it sooner or later and things would turn out peachy keen; surprising, especially since she wasn’t much of an optimist. Maybe she was forcing herself to believe that because she was one of the afflicted. Which is probably why his next question — what happens if you don’t get better? — stopped her thoughts in their tracks for a moment. This certainly wasn’t some illness that she was dying over — that was for damned sure. Attempting to avoid the question’s seriousness, she simply retreated behind a smile and said lightly, “Then I guess I won’t be drinking much anymore.” She meant it as a joke, though it came out more as a damnation. Her smile faltered, and she sighed into her forearms.


Nikita shrugged at his wandering thought, realizing afterwards that his eyes were closed and that he couldn’t see the action. “Maybe,” she supplemented, looking down to the sandy ground. “But… does it matter where it comes from? It’s here now, and we’ll just have to sit and wait to see what happens. If it disappears, great. If it doesn’t, we’ll figure it out then.” Even though the thoughts of more really-thirsty-but-not-hungry days were daunting in her mind.

Did it matter where it came from? Laurel shrugged. He didn't know if it mattered or not because there was just too great of a chance that it either did or it didn't. Fifty percent of the puzzle. He wondered if Jasper was even improving, knowing that the boy hadn't hardly moved since Ahren had brought him back to the shack. Then he had brought Laruku back who was not quite as bad as Jasper, but by now Laurel figured he was. Then Ahren himself was looking about the same. All of them were fighting it, or so he hoped. Whatever it was, it deserved to be fought if it could cripple them with a one-two punch like it had. But he hadn't seen the full range of symptoms either, so he didn't know how severe it was.



Frankly, he didn't want to know how severe it was. He didn't want it, but couldn't bring himself to just turn tail and get the hell away. The thought had crossed his mind a couple of times already. “Should probably figure out what to do now. We just don't get sick, not when we're all in good health… when we just get sick like that, it's always bad.” It wasn't bad, it was really bad, that's what he kept arguing with himself over. “Maybe I just wanna know what in the hell you all got into so I can avoid it,” he said, sounding a little more mean than he meant to be but it was true. He wanted to avoid it, he didn't want to get sick because then who would deal with everything?



“Someone has to be around in case we need to start burying people,” but would it really come to that so soon? Maybe they'd all die and rot down to the earth, some bird would pick at them and spread whatever they had around. It was how plagues were started, right? Rats and birds, scurrying around and eating each others shit and bodies. “Someone told me that before this fire on the other side of the mountain way north, this place seemed uninhabited. I bet this is why, there's probably something wrong with it.” But wasn't most of the north uninhabited? Most of what they had come through had been scarcely populated. It was like that all over the place with only large groups in intelligently sporadic areas.

Her thoughts had been mostly wandering once he started talking, and she only logged the more important things while she continued in her own mental course. This was, of course, until his somewhat bitter remark. Immediately her thoughts ran into a wall, and she quickly clicked into the routine she had developed for keeping her anger in check. Focusing on her breathing, keeping her heart rate down, focusing her eyes on something in the distance, thinking of sunshine and bunnies and happy shit… But it all didn’t work very well, seeing as though she usually didn’t expect comments such as that from the level-headed Laurel. It was somewhat miraculous how they very rarely got on one another’s bad sides (only to come to terms days — if not hours — later), but she didn’t really respect the whole doomsday attitude paired with underhanded remarks. Especially when she was so Goddamn sick!


She realized that she had grown as rigid in a statue, her eyes narrowed into the distance, when she came back around to real time. He had mostly continued on with his negativity, and she could feel it sinking into her like a different kind of illness. She clenched her jaw, struggling not to yowl at him for being so out-of-character. It was her job, to make the jabs and the pessimism, not his! “I have done nothing out of the ordinary since I came here,” she half-hissed under her breath. “So you don’t have to worry about that. And your whole apocalyptic attitude is starting to wear down on my nerves. You don’t go up to a sick person and start talking about how they want their funeral, Laurel. Not even when you’re drunk.” She didn’t guard the sharp edges in her words; mostly because she never had before. “I would suggest trying to keep out of the gutter as well as a straight face, because, otherwise, everyone else will start to freak out and we’ll really have doomsday on our hands. No matter what you think, there is worse than this out there.”


Nikita’s mind briefly flicked back to her first few months living away from her family, in that city. She had seen more doom and plague there to make this look like everyone catching the common cold. She shivered slightly before banishing the memories back from whence they came.

The few seconds of silence following his words told him everything he needed to know about what was going to come from her mouth next. She was always quick to anger, or maybe he was just good at knowing which buttons to push. So he took another drink in the quiet, letting the proverbial poison slosh around in his mouth for a moment before it slid down the back of his throat. Such a warmth was comforting, especially when she started to speak. Most of her words were lost on him because his recognition was turning more and more into that of a rock, but the tone and the bite in her words wasn't. For a moment everything on his end of the world stopped, thought trains crashing into one another and exploding into fiery balls of doom.



That was when he simply decided that he was bored of talking about the end of their world and inwardly dropped the topic like he should have. Anger radiated off of her like heat did from a fire, it crackled and popped in the open air at a level that he couldn't hear but could feel. Something else should have transpired in the silence—like an apology for starters—but it didn't; he remained silent. That little delay between the brain and the synapse wasn't enough to stop him as he struggled to sit up and looked over at her in such a glazed state. Definitely a sign his brain was going to mush slowly for sure. But without so much of a warning, he grabbed her firmly and kissed her. Maybe that would change her tune! It worked on others, anyway.

She probably knew that he probably didn’t really listen to a word that she said, but she forced herself to believe that he had just to preserve her own sanity — and perhaps his health. She couldn’t account for his well-being if she happened to snap into another aggressive stint. Gradually, as the silence drug on, her hot-burning anger began to lose fuel and began to smolder. His lack of a response kept it going on, though, but it wasn’t as blazing as it had been. She simply waited for any reaction from him… and then switched her olive gaze expectantly when he heaved himself up into a sitting position. She was waiting for an apology and perhaps some begging for forgiveness when he moved forward and sweeping her into an awkward and unexpected kiss.


Alarm swept through her, followed swiftly by confusion and a general stunned feeling. A few more moments passed as she was inactive — immobile — as she felt her mind and body overrun with more emotions than she could count, and more than she had names for. Her mind was moving just about as fluidly as his until, after she had wrenched her eyes shut more in anger and confusion than anything, she lifted an arm and — pretty forcefully — shoved him away. She drew herself back, her face twisted in a look of shock, confusion, and generally overshadowed by a shred of anger as she stared into his clouded eyes. She sighed then, trying to get rid of all of the emotions and sifting through them for useful ones. She lifted her hand again, this time placing it — too sternly to be influenced of any tender emotion — on the side of his face while saying in voice that sounded like a croak, “That’s not really the way to keep yourself from getting sick.” She then let her hand drop, turning her head and shoulders at a perpendicular angle from his. She looked into the distance, finding that she was no longer angry… at him. She was angry at herself for not being angry at him, if that made sense. It did to her. Eventually she muttered, “This is too complicated when I’m sober.” She shook her head slowly. “Okay, I guess I’m not angry anymore.” Not that she totally forgave him yet, but it was a decent band-aid.

She didn't kiss him back, but he knew that was all because of the surprise. The stillness that overcame her was impressive and if he hadn't needed one hand to keep himself propped up without falling over, he no doubt would have been roaming her body more so than just keeping the only free one on her leg. When she finally did shove him away, it was enough to knock him off kilter completely from the realm of those who could sit upright without problems, so he resigned to lying in a less than attentive heap for a moment. The world was spinning again but it wasn't why he had such a smug smile crawling across his face. The bottle of booze was also loose from his grasp, knocked over and rolling towards the lake itself to meet the water.



But he didn't care, not any more. By the time he had righted himself once again, she was grabbing a hold of him and for a spilt second his light lit up almost too eager for what was coming out of her mouth. Not what he expected or wanted to her, but she had a point. Getting sick, that would be a problem, wouldn't it? Laurel let his expression falter then, remembering the crisis at hand going on to their backs. “Well, if there isn't really anything we can do about it,” he said slowly, furrowing his brow as he tried to remember what she had said no more than five minutes ago, “we could at least humour one another.” Or something, he didn't care what they did as long as it took his mind off of things. Selfish, but she was right.



He really needed to keep a straight face.



But since she wasn't angry (or so she said), he carried on the banter that had been absent with a laugh. “That was pretty funny though, I don't think I've ever seen you lock up like that before when you're angry.” Though he wouldn't remember it come later, to him was a clever tactic. Other leader mouthing off and being all pissy? Kiss them! It works! MAGIC. “Took your mind off of things though, didn't it?” Cue sly grin, shifty look out of the side of his eye. He wanted to gauge her reaction either way, though he didn't have any current plans to go in for round two and see where that went. She was always packing that knife.

What she had said was clearly not what he had been expecting (honestly, sometimes she felt like the older one here), and she watched the lights catch and then fade quickly in his eyes. He seemed to have momentarily forgotten the topic of the illness until she had brought it back up again, but at least he seemed to catch her drift when she had mentioned just letting it be and not worrying about it. Laurel now seemed to want to drift too much in the other direction now, trying to set his mind to whatever else could distract him. Nikita sighed, growing chillingly quiet as he recalled her total physical — and mental, though he wouldn’t have known that — lockup that had occurred just moments before. The coyote shrugged, trying to act as though it was no big deal. It was, though; at least to her. She usually prided herself in her quick reactions (which often got her into trouble, actually), but that time she felt as though she couldn’t kick-start her mind to think any faster. Worrying, to say the least. Maybe the sickness was bothering her mind as well. Or…


Nikita blinked at his last question, fixating her muddled olive gaze on his sly one. Their eyes really were quite similar, she remarked once more. Almost identical. It was creepy. She could feel the words ‘Don’t get used to it’ on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn’t manage to say them. I must be going crazy. Nikita was usually one of the most willful individuals that you could come across, but, right now, she was having trouble sorting through her multitude of thoughts enough to say something intelligible. Or maybe that wasn’t it. Hell if she knew. She had to say something, though. “Yeah, it did. So what,” she said, though the defiance in her tone faded drastically in the second sentence. She placed a hand on her forehead — shoving her bandanna away from her eyes, where it was being annoying — and then leaned back on her elbows while she crossed her ankles in front of her. She stared intently down to the bank of the lake, looking like she had found some sudden interest in it. She could see the light glinting off of the bottle that had rolled to the shore, and she had half a mind to go and get it. If she wasn’t so tired.

Don't get used to it, was the very thing that was settling in his mind. He half expected to hear it and was just as surprised not to hear it; but it didn't matter that much. The fact that she didn't say it intrigued him more, unfortunately. “You don't have to act like I socked you in the nose,” he murmured. A kiss was a kiss and nothing more, there hadn't been any connection to it from his end but it had certainly rattled her cage. Of course, it had only been that past year that she had been hanging around him, it wasn't like she had hung over his shoulder before they had teamed up to go separate ways from where they had been last. He pulled his hat from his head then, lying back against the incline of the earth and let his eyes shut.



“How come you act so tough, anyway? It has to get old for you some time, always keeping everything in check or whatever. The world ain't out to get you, at least if it was, it isn't any more.” But what did he know? The past didn't matter that much to him, so much that he had started to forget parts and pieces of it at random. It was better that way, better to hang onto the memories that were good than the ones that were bad. He felt like he had a lot of good memories. “You should lighten up a little bit and maybe spontaneity won't startle you so much.” Was he being mean again? He didn't know, he didn't understand the garble up sound of his voice any more.

She snorted lightly at his comment, taking back her previous action and pulling her bandanna purposefully over her eyes. Granted some solitude by the make-shift blindfold, she crossed her arms and acted as though she was trying to rest. The truth was, if she looked back closely, she was pretty sure she had been socked in the nose more times in her life than she had been kissed. What a depressing thought that was. Biting back a groan, she focused her mind on trying to see through her bandanna and found some solace in the meaningless task. Such were old habits that she had gotten when she was a kid and, years later, still harbored.


But, all in all, Nikita was just one giant bad habit that she couldn’t break. She was reminded of this very acutely as he continued on. Usually Laurel wasn’t really one to care about such things, so she wondered if the alcohol was something that was loosening his tongue for such critical speech. She paused before speaking, her words reflecting no emotion, “I guess bad habits are hard to break.” Though she had had a year to try and work her way out of them, it was really difficult. She was too used to feeling vulnerable — too trained to see danger in things that, in other eyes, would simply seem more like paranoia than anything. It was these habits that had kept her alive in her old life, and now all they were doing was weigh her down. It was enough to get her even more depressed. Great; that was just what she needed now.


His final statement rang in her ears for a moment, and she briefly pondered them. Gradually, her depression slipped away as she simply… stopped thinking. Stopped anticipating, stopped trying to read expressions to gain insight to thoughts, stopped trying to guess consequences. Which was why it was strange when she rolled onto her side closest to him, her eyes searching his. “You think so?” she said, her voice sounding much more like a low, soft murmur rather than the harsh croak that stress and illness had imposed upon it before. Without another thought, she leaned in closer.

“I don't think it's a bad habit,” because it wasn't a bad trait to have. But it didn't need to be the only trait that she did have, he thought. Surely it wasn't the only one she had, because he thought for sure he had seen other sides of her come out to play at times. But at the same time, he argued internally that it was her right to act how she wanted to act and that he didn't have any control over that and probably shouldn't have been trying to direct her otherwise. But maybe it was kind of the thing that needed to be said, especially when she rolled over into his view. If he had any trains left on the track, they were derailing or at least teetering back and forth.



He figured, this would play out one of two ways. She was either luring him into a trap or being honest; he was too far gone to tell the difference. She looked a little fuzzy. “What's the harm in it?” he answered her question with another question, directly avoid giving an answer that could earn him something he didn't want. “I mean, you can't be all concrete, right? I don't know very many who get away with it, unless they are concrete,” and he had talked to a couple of sidewalks in the past. They were never very accompanying when balance was hard to maintain.



“So what are you plotting now?” Castration?

She shrugged at his return question, not really bothering to summon up the strength to actually reply. His latter statement, however, was long enough to warrant at least a one-worded response. “True,” she said in such a low whisper that she could barely hear her own words — just the sound of wind passing past her lips. Concrete… that was an interesting term to use, but it actually seemed pretty true. Nikita always seemed to be wound up tighter than a rubber-band ball. Perhaps she should loosen up sometimes, without the ever-helpful aid of alcohol. Perhaps life wouldn’t be nearly as stressful that way. She realized that her eyes had started to stare at nothing in particular when he spoke up again, and a small, mischievous smile appeared on her lips as her olive eyes focused on his once more. She pondered actually getting around to answering him… but then thought that perhaps actions were a bit more pronounced than words sometimes.


And so, without another thought crossing through her mind after that, she leaned in to kiss him. She had no idea what his own reaction would be — quite frankly, she hadn’t even thought ahead that far. She had to learn how to loosen up, and something said this might be a… fairly good way to try. Nikita simply shut out all other thoughts, worries, and emotions and simply existed in this very moment.

There were obviously no words, only an amused laugh caught in his throat; he struggled not to crack too much of a smile at her response to ruin the moment. Spontaneity was one of the things that he lived his life for and this was definitely such a thing. In a much more sober state, he wouldn't have pictured the unfolding scene happening in a million years, but the fact that it was only served to make him want to smile even wider, it made him want to laugh just as carefree as he usual did. Ultimately, one of the things that did detract from the crisis around them was the fact that he could focus solely on one person and put all of his undivided attention into that person. But before he got too carried away, Laurel broke away from their kiss and smiled a paper-thin smile. “We should take this somewhere more private…” Secret code for, my place or yours?

but all other things shall fade away
while love stands alone and still holds sway
all other things shall fade away
into the ground, into the grey

Her mind seemed to have totally stopped working, but it wasn’t a bad thing. No, not a bad thing at all. The total quiet and dark that kept her company now was something that she welcomed with open arms. The previous tension about trying not to think about dying to her mysterious illness (which was even further back in her mind now) and all else seemed so miniscule at the moment. She lived for each and every second there until, after what seemed like much longer than a few moments, they were apart. At first, her expression verged precarious between annoyed and disappointed, but his words quickly returned an impish light to her face. She stood swiftly, reaching out to help him up. Then, keeping hold of his hand once offered, she would not say a word. She simply made the path for the two of them through the moonlit camp beside the glittering lake to a place a bit more private…


I give my body up into the flames
and never once have I denied your name
but I don't know the first thing about love
I don't know the first thing about love