Notes: I didn't know "angsty fluff" was a possible combination, but apparently it is. Maybe this isn't fluff. I'm not sure. It seems like it to me, because there's not much plot to it. I had an idea, it was a good idea, it didn't go anywhere, I finished writing it. Yeah. That's pretty much it. Not much background exposition either. On a side note, the more I watch the miniseries, the more my reaction goes towards, "Ah, they butchered it."
Black and red.
The black was volcanic mud, dark granitic stuff from the smoldering caldera whose peak dominated the city. The volcano itself was gray. Usually the dirt and rock of the street was gray, too. But it was black now, and churned into a chaotic mess. It was black because of the red.
The black stopped where the red began - which was on the wooden walkways and the walls of the buildings, on the fragments of lives that had once called the city home. There was so much red. It filled her vision until the entire world seemed to be painted merely in shades of red and black. She was trying not to look, but she had to, had to see, had to make sure for the report. And in truth she couldn't not see. Couldn't avert her eyes from all the spattered horrors.
And the smell...
She knew what carrion smelled like. The rot of dead things. Of death. It drifted to her own home sometimes, on hot updrafts from the canyon's depths. But never was it so pervasive, so overwhelming. It choked her. Gagged her. Her stomach lurched.
The mud sucked at her feet, clinging to her with the tenacity of a dead man's hand. She tugged one foot free, but the other remained trapped in the black goo. She looked down to see that it was not the mud at all, but a dead man's hand indeed.
But the man wasn't dead.
He was dead, but he wasn't. He was staring up at her with the remains of his face, a baleful, milky eye pinning her to the spot where she stood more far more effectively than his hand.
Too late, the wind whispered, swirling around her with carrion smells. Too late.
Panicked, she tore herself from the dead man's grasp and ran through the mud. More hands, saurian and human, reached out for her, grabbing at her, trying to drag her into the black with them. She managed to get to one of the walkways and ran, feet slipping in the sticky pools of red. Her shoulder smacked into one of the walls and she nearly fell.
Too late. Too late.
This time the admonishment was given voice by the dead. So many dead. A child's hands clutched at her jacket and she struck them away, blindly fleeing.
She choked and realized she was crying. I'm sorry, she wanted to howl at them. I tried! But the words refused to leave her throat.
She didn't know where she was going and the tears were blurring her vision anyway. The smell was getting worse, and the hands were everywhere, and so too was the hammering accusation.
Too late. Too late. Too late. Too late. Too late. Too late. Too late. Too late...
A wall loomed up out of nowhere. Forced to stop, she whirled and looked for a way to escape again. But the dead would not let her go.
Too late, they shouted at her, too late!
She fell to her knees in the black mud, crying, and as the hands seized her, pulled at her, she tried one last time to tell them. I'm sorry, I'm sorry -
"I'm sorry!"
The cry jolted Romana out of the dream, out of sleep. She was sitting in her bed in Canyon City, blankets and sheets tangled around her, and the memory of the dream tangled around her mind in the same manner. And there were hands on her -
She jerked back, trying to get away, kicking the bedclothes off of her in another panicked flight, and all before the identity of the hands' owner had registered.
"Hey, relax, it's just me," she heard him saying, but then David reached out towards her again and it was too much. She blocked the gesture, pushing him away, putting space between them, finally winning the fight against the sheets and getting the floor beneath her feet again.
"No - don't touch me," she said, fumbling for the exit and the cool night beyond, and her voice sounded strange and terrified to her own ears. "Please, just- Just stay away!"
"What's wrong?"
But she was already outside. Running. Not walking. She knew the canyon paths blind, backwards and forwards. She could run without looking and be safe. And she wasn't looking - she was untangling from the dream, separating reality from imagination.
The chill air helped. So too did the stars overhead, and the feel of the dry, thin dirt under her bare toes, and the gaping chasm scant inches from her. None of those things had been present in Volcaneum. In Volcaneum the sun had been riding high, and there had been thick mud, stained black by the blood of the pterandon swarm's victims, and the air had been hot and heavy with sulfur and the scent of death.
She wasn't running to any particular place, and eventually she stopped and leaned into the cliff wall, pressing her face to the stone, breathing. It was such a simple thing, breathing, and yet so very important. The dead did not draw breath. She remembered. Oh, she remembered...
"Romana?"
David again. She lifted her head from the rock, still faintly warm from the heat of the day, and saw that he had halted some distance away. "Yes?"
"I heard you through the wall," he said, glancing back at the direction of their rooms, little more than distant flickers of light. The sunstones were hidden by the curve of the canyon, but their glow gave them away. "What's wrong?"
"I had a nightmare," she told him. "I'm fine."
He was frowning now, and did not appear to have heard her final statement, because he only looked more concerned and took a few steps closer. "A nightmare? About what?"
She hesitated, because it wasn't his business, but a part of her wanted to tell someone, and who else was there to tell? Her pride forbid telling any of the master skybax riders, or her peers; but David was her friend, after a fashion. "Volcaneum."
He didn't understand, she could see, so she went on. "When the pteranodons attacked. I flew there with one of the patrols." Her voice faltered. "But we were... too late."
An understanding nod. "It was bad."
Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes, sharp and stinging, and she blinked them down. "It was very bad. Pterandons are scavengers, but they can also be predators. And they... they're messy eaters."
"I - I'm sorry," he said, uncertain, and then added, "I don't know what to say."
"That's fine." She rested her head against the stone again. The words had a ragged edge to them. Cracked. As though her heart was an egg that someone had stepped on. "There's nothing to say."
"Oh." He moved slightly backwards, and for a moment she thought he was going to leave. He was uncomfortable enough that she could see why he'd want to. She was poor company at the best of times, and this was hardly the best of times.
But he didn't leave, and some part of her was glad for that. To be alone in the darkness, with dream-fragments still dancing behind her eyes, flashing into her consciousness whenever she tried not to think about it... That would have shattered the fragile egg's shell altogether.
The question came tentatively on the canyon breeze: "Do you want to, you know, talk about it?"
"No. And yes." She turned, back to the rocks, so she could see both him and the world in front of her. He waited. After a long moment, she said, "The worst part, I think, was that I had to leave again right away. There were other places to warn, and I... I couldn't stay to give them any final passage, any sort of proper goodbye. We just had to leave them there, in the streets..."
The tears sprang up once more, stronger this time, and she no longer had the power or the desire to fight them. All her strength, it seemed, remained mired in the black mud of Volcaneum. She hung her head, hiding from the stars, and cried.
"Hey, whoa, don't do that," he said, startled and uneasy, and in between gulping breaths she wondered if it was so unexpected and disturbing to see her cry.
"It shouldn't have happened," she told him, tasting warm salt and remembering the heavy copper scent of blood instead. Much too late.
"No." A pause, then, "Are you going to freak out again if I touch you?"
Despite the tears, her mouth twitched in a smile; the term was unfamiliar, but she thought she knew what he meant. "I think I'm already 'freaking out'."
He took a few more steps towards her, getting within arm's reach and acting not a little like she might lash out at him anyway. "Yeah, you are. I just wondered if I was gonna end up with more bruises."
"I'm sorry," she said, humiliation rising up and bringing more tears with it. She brushed away water from her face with the heel of her hand, and then he pulled her into an awkward hug on both their parts. But he didn't let go, and neither did she, and after a moment the awkwardness passed and it was just one friend offering comfort to another.
He chuckled a little at her apology and she felt it, running through the muscles of his chest and body. He was warmer than the rocks had been. "Jesus, Romana, don't apologize. It's my fault. I know better than to walk in on a nightmare."
She closed her eyes, then opened them again when a red-and-black picture painted itself before her mind's eye. The tears had mostly stopped, leaving a barren feeling in their place. "Nightmares. Since it happened. I just want it to stop, David."
It sounded pathetic even as she said it, and she wanted to take it back; the words hung in the air for a moment, growing ever more childish in her memory.
"You know, back home, there was this war," he said. More confident, more conversational. As if they were having a discussion in the training room instead of standing in the middle of an empty cliff path in the dark of night. "In a country called Vietnam. A lot of really bad stuff happened on both sides, and a lot of the soldiers came back with nightmares."
The knowledge that she could share symptoms with Outer World soldiers surprised her to no end. The Outer World had always sounded like such a heartless place; surely the horrors there would have to be beyond her imaginings. "They did?"
"Yeah. So many of them did, the doctors gave it a name. Post-traumatic stress disorder."
She turned the words over in her mind, trying to get a feel for them. It didn't really give her any clue as to what the problem was. Where was the emotion, the empathy, the compassion for those hurting? Heartless indeed.
"But it can happen to anyone," he went on. "It doesn't have to be war. Just something, well, traumatic."
"Like seeing a city slaughtered," she murmured, flinching involuntarily. His hold on her tightened, perhaps involuntarily, perhaps not. It made her grateful and claustrophobic all at once. "I don't suppose there's a way to fix it."
"I don't know." He chuckled again, ruefully this time. "I kind of stopped paying attention at that point. My Psychology teacher had this habit of droning on and on..."
She smiled again, the ghost of a smile, stung with a thousand splintered bits of shell. "It's all right. I'll survive."
"The thing to remember, I think," he said, softer and more hesitant, "is that it wouldn't hurt so much if you didn't care so much. Me - God, I grew up with violence everywhere. Fake violence, mostly, but still there. This is all like a video game or a movie or something for me. I can block out the things I saw in Waterfall City. I just... You're a stronger person than I am."
"Is that the truth." She pulled away, no longer comfortable, but for a different reason than before. This discomfort had more to do with the tone of his voice than any horror from thedepths of her dreams.
He regarded her seriously, but with a flicker of anxiety that she saw even in her self-absorbed state. "It is."
The ridiculousness of that lent her voice a noticible incredulity: "I think you're overestimating me and underestimating yourself."
Long seconds passed. He was staring at her, and that made her anxious herself. "I don't."
She shook her head and went to wipe away the last remnants of her tears, but he moved, quick and no longer anxious, and brushed his fingers across her face. Something bright and white-hot flared, and for a moment - for a moment - she forgot about the nightmare altogether.
The breath caught in her throat, sticking there, every fiber of her body tensing, and she knew, somehow, that what she wanted to happen couldn't happen, not now. She knew that, although the touch and the words and the sense that arched through the air between them had glued those pieces of her poor cracked heart back together, it was more delicate than ever before. The next time it would break more easily. Fragment into dust. A different cause but the same results.
She was afraid. She was so afraid. And then it was too late.
"Thank you," she said, dropping her eyes to the orange-red sand, silvered by the moon and stars. She turned away, and it was like turning against the ocean's current, but she managed to do it. "I think I can go back to sleep now."
"Are you sure?"
She glanced over her shoulder, giving him a small but genuine smile. He looked as bereft as she felt. Perhaps "bereft" was not the proper word. She felt empty, hollow, wrung clean of all emotions. "I'll just have to dream about something else."
That garnered her a smile in return. He started walking.
And she starting walking too, barefoot and brushed with the wind, sand crunching underfoot like eggshells. Walked, silent, aware of the young man beside her, but not; walked with slow, measured steps towards the lights of home. When she got there, she knew, she would lie awake and think of all the things that should not have happened, and all the things that should.
Black and red.