Heart of the Mountain
Chapter 2. Earthquake
The deep rumbling sound and the sharp crash of falling mountainside was deafening and terrifying. Stiles could do nothing but huddle on the floor, fear routing him to the spot.
Then Derek was next to him, leaning over him as if to protect him from the falling rocks and stones. He dragged Stiles to his feet and, still using his body as a shield over the stooped teen, he pulled him across the cave, retracing their steps towards the entrance.
Just as they reached the other side of the cavern, the noise and the falling rocks stopped as suddenly as they had begun. Not minutes before, there had been the opening to the wide tunnel that led back to the cave entrance. Now there was just a pile of rubble completely blocking their way out.
Stiles held his flashlight up, first checking the blocked passageway and then strafing the cavern walls with its beam to check the damage done by the earthquake. He had been surprised that neither he nor Derek had been hit by the falling rocks but now he understood why.
"Derek, look," he said pulling at his companion's sleeve, "the rocks are only around the edges. Nothing's fallen in the middle, just felt like it at the time. But nothing hit us. Just sealed us in. That wasn't an earthquake; I think it was the sprite's doing."
Derek harrumphed his agreement as he set to work moving the rocks to unblock the way out. Stiles set down the flashlight on a rocky outcrop and began to help with some of the smaller stones.
It wasn't until several minutes had passed that Stiles noticed something wasn't right.
"Derek, stop a minute."
Derek straightened up but didn't look like he was going to stop until he saw the expression on Stiles' face.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
"We've just moved a ton of rock but look: nothing's changed." Stiles picked up the flashlight and shone it up onto the rubble pile stacked against the rock face in front of them. "The tunnel is still completely blocked. As we take rock away, more takes its place. It's like magic. Is that even possible?"
"It's got to be an enchantment. The water sprite must be doing this," Derek said, dusting his hands on his jeans. "It's going to keep us here until we give it what it wants."
"But we don't know what it wants. It didn't say, just got all cryptic. Hey, you're not related, are you?" Stiles asked, getting a patented Derek glare for his trouble.
Derek snatched the flashlight from Stiles and swept its beam around the cavern. "There are no other exits, although I can feel a slight movement in the air above us so I think fresh air is getting in somewhere up there." He indicated the vaulted ceiling of the cavern some thirty or more feet above their heads.
"Oh, wonderful," Stiles complained, "no chance of reaching the roof to see if there might be a way out up there. Oh well, at least we won't suffocate … or die of thirst," he said as he nodded towards the stream that was still bubbling up slowly from under the stone wall on the far side of the cavern and disappearing under the pile of rocks they had tried to move.
"You may soon wish we didn't have access to air or any water," Derek said flatly as he sat down on the broken stump of a stalagmite, setting the flashlight on the floor alongside him.
"Why would I wish to run out of air and water?" Stiles said, looking at Derek as if he had just transformed into a poodle.
"Better the quicker death of asphyxiation or dehydration than to die slowly of starvation," Derek informed him as if that would be obvious to even a pre-schooler.
"Oh, well you're a little ray of sunshine, aren't you," Stiles retorted with a shudder. "Anyway, Scott will come looking for us when we're not back by tomorrow. It won't be difficult to find us because you just have to follow the river back to its source. He'll come rescue us."
"And how will he rescue us exactly? That tunnel could be blocked all the way to the front of the cave. So even if it wasn't filled with enchanted rocks that magically re-appear, it would take a team of firefighters weeks to dig us out."
"And it just keeps getting better and better!" Stiles groaned. "Alright, so, we're stuck here until we give Chuckles the Clown what he wants. But on a note of optimism here, in the interests of balance and avoiding unnecessary panic, I would point out that Chuckles could have killed us with his magical earthquake. But he didn't."
"In the interests of balance, maybe we just got lucky. Or unlucky, for those of us not relishing starving to death."
"Oh my god, you are just so negative!" Stiles threw his hands up in mock horror. "Can we not focus on the downside for once?"
Derek just shrugged then hunched over and seemed to threaten his boots with an angry stare.
"Awesome!" Stiles sighed heavily. "Well, okay, the 'I'm-not-a-nymph-I'm-a-sprite' troll wants us to solve its riddle before it lets us out of here so we'd better hurry up and figure it out."
"You have any suggestions?" Derek asked, pitching an eyebrow in a way which suggested he knew the answer was 'no'.
"Well, not yet but give me a minute to think," Stiles pulled a face, "He – it – whatever – said, um, 'What I want you can't give,' then, um, 'you need two of them to live.'
"'What I want no one can give, two are needed for it to live.' That's what it actually said," Derek corrected him. "It stressed the 'one' of 'no one'. I think that means nobody in isolation and maybe it was referring to an action rather than an object."
"You mean, it's not like, um, you need two lungs to live but more like 'breathing' is the answer?"
"Yes, although it's possible to survive with one lung so that analogy doesn't work."
"Aw, Mr Grumpy-Butt Sour-Wolf!" Stiles grumbled as he grabbed up the flashlight to search out a suitable place to sit. He checked around for a bit before sitting himself down on the floor a few feet from Derek where he could lean against the base of a large stalagmite. He swung arcs of light around the cavern, half-heartedly looking for an escape route, knowing that there wasn't one.
"You'd better turn that thing off," Derek advised abruptly. "We should conserve the battery."
"Oh," Stiles said sadly as he pushed the button to shut the light off. "Ow!" After a few seconds the light switched on again.
"That's really dark," Stiles complained, "I couldn't see anything. I mean, nothing. At all."
"That would be the lack of light," Derek observed bluntly.
"No shit, Sherlock! But there's dark, and then there's dark. This was uber-dark. I couldn't see my hand in front of my face."
"That would be the lack of light," Derek repeated with emphasis.
"Well, duh! But usually I can see something. You know, make out vague shapes if nothing else."
"Only when there is some small amount of light. But we are currently in the middle of a mountain. No light could penetrate this far into the mountain even if we weren't shut in."
"Oh, there's that ray of sunshine again! Silly me! The light doesn't reach this far into the mountain! Way to cheer me up!"
Stiles knew he sounded a bit panicky and tried to calm himself with deep breaths. But that just got him wondering how many deep breaths he could take before he used up all the oxygen for both him and Derek, and then Derek would die because he was certain werewolves still needed to breathe even if they did have super healing powers, so Derek would die and it would all be his fault and then he'd be alone and Derek would be dead and …
"Slow your breathing. You're about to hyperventilate," Derek said, regarding Stiles with a strange look that he couldn't place. It couldn't be worry, so why was he looking at him like that?
Stiles nodded and began to consciously think about slowing his breathing down. But it was a struggle and he seemed to be making things worse. His breaths became deeper and then he felt nauseous. He began to feel that, despite inhaling so deeply, he couldn't catch his breath at all, as if the oxygen in the cavern had already been used up.
Then Derek was talking to him quietly, rhythmically, "Hold your breath for the count of three before you breathe out. Breathe in now, and hold, two, three, and out. Now in, slowly, and hold, two, three, out slowly, and in … take your time, no rush, hold, two, three and out …"
Stiles did as he was told, trusting that Derek was helping him and trying not to focus on how weird this had just become. As he listened, he began to feel calmer and his panicked breaths became less erratic. Stiles realised that he was breathing to the pace set by Derek's soothing tone and part of him marvelled that a permanently pissed off, grumpy, abrasive alpha werewolf could be so comforting.
"That's it," Derek was saying, "just listen to me now, don't think about your breathing; just think about my voice. Let your breathing take care of itself now, while you just listen to me. Relax and let yourself calm down naturally. That's good. I can hear your heart rate drop. And your breathing is settling. Are you feeling better?"
"Um, yeah, I don't feel like I'm gonna throw up now. Um, thanks." Stiles could feel his cheeks glowing red with embarrassment. "How did you know to do that?"
Derek looked away and Stiles thought he wasn't going to answer but then suddenly he said, "Laura used to get panic attacks after…. after what happened."
"Oh. Sorry. Yeah, I used to get them a lot after my mom died. Haven't had one in a long while."
"It won't help either of us figure out how to get out of here if you're passed out on the floor," Derek observed, suddenly sounding very put-upon.
"No, yeah, um, sorry," Stiles mumbled, wondering how Derek could switch from super-helpful to mega-irritated so easily.
"I suggest you keep the flashlight on until you think you can survive the dark without panicking," Derek offered testily.
"Yeah, sorry," he said again, his cheeks still burning, wondering why Derek had to be such a douche-bag sometimes.
He left the light on.
"We can't stay here indefinitely," Derek said sharply, "Do you have any idea what the water sprite wants?"
"Not a clue," Stiles said emphatically, a little cross for some reason that it was back to the business at hand, although he was grateful to be dropping the whole 'afraid of the dark' topic.
"It wants something," Stiles continued, "that works with two but not with just one, and it clearly thinks we can come up with the answer because it's trapped us here until we do. So what can two do that one can't? Two eyes give 3-D vision, you know, give you depth of field that you don't get with just one eye. And two heads are better than one. Oh, but then you can be in two minds, so maybe not. And you can kill two birds with one stone, but I'm not sure…"
"Stiles, I don't think running through every idiom you've ever heard that mentions two of something is going to help," Derek complained, but he didn't sound as annoyed as he usually did when Stiles rattled on about something irrelevant.
"Sorry, sorry, just thinking out loud."
"Do you ever do any other kind of thinking?" Derek asked, and Stiles thought that, even though his face was mostly in shadow, he might have seen the corners of Derek's mouth turn up just a little.
"They call it 'brainstorming' in business circles and I understand it can be very productive," Stiles said in a mock-wounded voice. "Perhaps if you joined in we could bounce ideas off one another and that might help."
"You're assuming there is a solution and that the sprite isn't just messing with us because it can."
"You really are a glass half empty kind of sour wolf, aren't you?"
Derek shrugged. "We need to be open to all possibilities."
"Well, I'd rather occupy my time trying to think about what that little water pixie wants rather than just dwell on our impending deaths from starvation, thank you very much."
Derek shrugged again, this time as if conceding a point though he didn't say anything.
"You know, I assumed it was a sort of riddle," Stiles mused. "Well, actually the riddle was the clue and the clue he gave us was actually a riddle, but… Anyway, what if it's not? A riddle, in the conventional sense, I mean. It seemed that it got an idea of what it wanted that would 'liven things up'. Then it said, when we'd figured out what it wanted we'd do it and then it would go. So it's something to do with us. Something we need to do. Something that we need to do that isn't boring."
"That's the impression I got too. But it doesn't make sense." Stiles watched Derek as he glared at the cavern walls as if he could make the solution appear there and he was almost surprised that the walls didn't collapse under the intensity of Derek's stare.
Derek sighed as he mumbled to himself, "There's nothing here except rock. What on earth can we do in an empty cave?"