applesaucedream | Never Lie, Never Sin, Tell Us What A Mess We're In [Open to Multiple]

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Never Lie, Never Sin, Tell Us What A Mess We're In [Open to Multiple]

Melanie stares at the door to her cell. There is something different about it today. She's having a little trouble placing it, but she knows there's something off. It's concerning. She has been so clear about what ROMAC needs to do to keep everyone else safe from her, and the suspicion that they're messing up somehow makes her very, very nervous.

It's the locks, she realizes after a few moments of intense scrutiny. That is what's wrong. There are supposed to be five, but she only counts four. That can't be right. Melanie approaches the door with a little frown on her face, her fingertips hovering a few inches from the metal, wary of the shock she'll get if she actually touches it. Her hand flits from lock to lock like a hummingbird. Now there are six. How are there six? She counts again, baffled to find that the number has halved itself to three.

She tries to count again, but this time, there are none.

Now she does reach out to touch the door, she can't help it - she can't believe it. They can't have taken the locks away. They're important. Hasn't she made it clear how incredibly important it is that they keep her in here?

The door does not shock her. Instead, it swings open beneath her hand, smooth and silent.

Melanie presses her lips together, her mouth a thin, disapproving line. She doesn't like the thought of leaving her room, but someone has to be told about this so they can get it fixed. Keeping her movements slow and even, as if she's trying to sneak past a group of hungries, Melanie carefully steps out into the hall to look for help.

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Melanie's excitement is infectious, and once again Daniel can't suppress a grin.

"I did go on a lot of digs," he replies. No need to mention that quite a few of them happened to be on alien planets. That's a discussion for a time that's not now. "Not to Greece, unfortunately. Egypt, though. South America a few times."

He keeps the details minimal because they've just reached an elevator, the first divergence in the grim and empty aesthetic Daniel's seen since showing up in this place. He moves toward it, but Melanie heads to the stairs instead. And opens the very heavy-looking door without undue effort.

Daniel silently adds "apparent exceptional strength" to the rapidly growing list of abilities this small child has displayed since he's met her. He assumes she possesses them in the waking world, because Melanie handles them all quite deftly and certainly doesn't seem to find it odd that she has a disproportionate amount of strength and motor control for someone of her age and build. It's growing quite clear to him that with her host of enhanced abilities, she probably could have escaped from this area any time she liked and simply chose not to. She honestly believes she's best kept in here. Daniel still finds that troubling.

He trusts her instinct in this case and follows her up the stairs. He doesn't have a problem with elevators, but he can see why someone would.

"I take it we're underground?" he asks, watching Melanie move with a speed that very easily surpasses his with muted astonishment.

"South America," Melanie echoes as she climbs up two stories and steps out into another featureless hallway. "Did you get to see the Amazon rainforest?" She is quickly and unsurprisingly growing envious of Daniel's traveling experiences. She's seen pictures of the rainforest, but international travel was all but nonexistent after the Breakdown.

She leads Daniel around a corner and up to a large set of double doors. Beyond them: a subterranean parking garage. Melanie grins, pleased that everything seems to be working out so far. "Nearly there," she informs Daniel cheerfully.

"No, but I did get to look at some very interesting sites in Peru."

Melanie obviously knows her way around; it isn't long at all before they've reached a promising-looking set of doors.

He pauses for a minute before asking his next question because he suspects he already knows the answer, but if they're about to set foot outside the building it's a relevant segue. "Have you ever traveled?"

"No. Not really." It's echoey down here, and Melanie lowers her voice out of an ingrained desire to not be too loud. But her quietness also fits the downward shift her mood has taken. She doesn't think the attempted trek to Beacon counts as traveling, especially since they were just talking about visiting other countries - exciting places. She can't even say she's seen London as Daniel would imagine it, even though she's technically been there.

But it doesn't matter, Melanie decides, giving herself a little mental shake. She's going to go outside and do some exploring now. That will be nice.

The lot slopes up to a garage door that is firmly shut, but there's a smaller, regular sort of door next to it that opens under Melanie's hand. She pushes it open with an anticipatory grin and steps out into the milky daylight.

It's not what she was expecting.

Melanie freezes a pace or two away from the door, the grin dropping right off of her face, and slowly turns her head to take it in. It might have been a bustling urban area twenty years ago, but now it's in shambles. The pavement is cracked and weed-choked. Virtually every window has long since shattered, leaving the sidewalks littered with broken glass. There are a few abanoned vehicles rusting away on what remains of the street. It is eerily quiet.

In one direction, the road vanishes into a looming wall of soft, indistinct grey that looks almost like a fog bank. It isn't. In the other direction, several blocks away, there is a clustered group of gaunt-looking people that could almost be statues, they're standing so still. But they aren't statues.

They aren't people, either. Not anymore.

Melanie slowly turns to look back at Daniel, lifting a hand in warning as she does so. Every gesture is smooth, almost lazy, but she doesn't dare move quickly. That might get their attention.

"Move slow," she says in a faint murmur that he should have no problem hearing over the ringing silence of the city, "and talk quietly. We don't want them," she carefully gestures down the road, toward the distant group, "to notice us."

Edited 2014-10-21 01:34 (UTC)

No. Daniel doesn't expect she has.

But she doesn't seem to want to dwell. Out the door and into the open she goes, and Daniel follows a half-step behind as he steps right into a world he doesn't recognize.

It's so empty and chilling and utterly bereft of movement that it puts Daniel on the defensive immediately. The entire area is desolate, torn apart years before now, and completely abandoned.

Well, but no. Not completely. Daniel almost doesn't see the people in the distance because they're all standing deceptively still, practically indiscernible from the rest of the quiet panorama. Daniel doubts he would have noticed them at all if Melanie hadn't pointed them out to him in hushed undertone.

He jerks his head once in a thoroughly unsettled nod. The way she's moving now, with an eerily practiced fluidity, leads him to believe that this world has been pulled straight from her head. He shivers in a doomed effort to shake off how incredibly off-putting the whole area is. And closer inspection of the distant figures reveals something horribly...wrong about all of them as well. Yeah, he's going to trust Melanie with this one.

"Would we be safer inside?" he whispers, not taking his eyes off the collection of individuals a few blocks down.

Her eyes widen a little at that nod of his - it's far too fast, far too sudden, and she casts a paranoid glance at the group of hungries to see if they've noticed. Fortunately, it doesn't seem they have. With their heads slightly bowed, it's possible that they just can't see what's happening this far down the street, anyway, but this is not a time to be taking chances.

"Slow," she reminds him, demonstrating with a sluggish nod of her own. The gesture takes a full five seconds to complete. "They respond to movement, sound, and smell."

As if on cue, a faint breeze rolls down the avenue, stirring Melanie's modest growth of hair as it passes by en route from the grey wall to the hungries. It occurs to her, with a little jolt of panic, that Daniel isn't wearing e-blocker. He can't be - why would he? - and it's as if that realization works some sort of horrible magic, because suddenly Melanie can smell him. And the hungries are downwind.

For a moment, she can almost imagine that his too-human scent is an actual cloud, visible to the naked eye as it's borne by the wind down the street. She can almost see it hit the hungries. As one, they turn to face the pair, heads swiveling in their general direction, casting blindly from side to side before locking onto their target.

Hungries only have two settings. When they come, it's at a dead sprint.

"Run!" Melanie shouts, diving for the door they just came through and wrenching it open. It looks different, rusted and dirtied to match everything else, but the building appears to be the same aside from two decades of wear. Once Daniel's inside, she slams the door shut, not bothering to try for a lock. Hungries aren't that sophisticated. But you don't need to be sophisticated to beat down a door through sheer mindless determination.

Melanie grabs Daniel's hand and tugs him back the way they came. "Hurry!" A moment later, the lot echoes with the thuds of multiple bodies slamming against the door.

Daniel sucks in a breath and then silently berates himself for the noise and then lets it out in a long, silent exhale and nods back, slowly this time.

His eyes flick back over at the gathered people in the distance just in time for the breeze to lift up and -

- and then they all stare directly at him with awful, pinpoint accuracy.

There's something wrong with their eyes. There's something wrong with their everything.

Oh god. Oh fuck.

Daniel takes Melanie's order to heart quite willingly as he tears inside and Melanie slams the door behind them, but before he can request a hurried explanation she's seized his hand and begun dragging him back through the building. He notes with an absurd, distant calm that it looks more dilapidated now, shifted to fit along with the setting, he supposes. The sound of their pursuers thudding against the door - they move really fucking fast, oh god - reawakens the adrenaline and his normally dormant survival instinct, and Daniel dials up his speed instantly.

"What - the - hell?" he pants out between gasps. He's not sure how long he can keep up this rate, but the threat of those people, those things catching up to him is keeping him from flagging thus far.

Out of the parking garage and into the building itself, which is no longer quite so featureless as it had been. Now, there are puddles of stagnant water on the ground and black patches of mold on the formerly pristine walls and ceiling. There is still power, somehow, enough to keep a scant few fluorescent lightbulbs guttering, and it's by that inconstant light that Melanie seeks out her original route to her room. She doesn't know if they'll be safe there - has no way of knowing if the door is even still on its hinges - but she (quite literally) doesn't know anyplace else to go.

"Hungries," she replies in a terse undertone. Are there more inside? She gets her answer when they splash through their first puddle - a second later, the sound raggedly echoes back from several directions. They're everywhere. Melanie releases Daniel's hand so she can shove open the stairwell door and start down ahead of him. They already know they're being pursued; she needs to make sure they're not about to run headfirst into another group of them.

"I have to check ahead," she says, still somehow managing to keep her voice reasonably low. Shouting would only attract more, though she hopes the stairwell, at least, will be clear. "Shout if they get too close. And don't let them bite you." With that, she picks up speed, vaulting down the staircase in more of a controlled fall than a run.

He keeps pace just behind until they get to the stairway, where Daniel stops and tries not to keel over, heart hammering in his ribs, while Melanie moves down the stairs and out of sight.

Hungries. So zombies, basically. Except zombies shouldn't be able to move so fast. Hungries.

How pleasant.

For now, Daniel focuses on trying to reclaim some control of his lungs. And keeps his eyes trained on the hall behind him, waiting for a horde of those things to come darting into sight any moment -

Oh, there we go.

One of them sprints around the corner and heads straight for Daniel, who barely has time to lash out with an unchecked fist before it can reach him. He smashes his hand into its jaw, shuddering at the way the flesh instantly caves beneath his knuckles, but that doesn't deter it for very long. He locks his arms around its neck to keep it from getting closer but its hands scrabble at his shoulders, straining to get at him.

To bite him.

Daniel sucks in a breath to shout and gets a lungful of something musty and organic-smelling along with the cloying, sweet stink of putrefying flesh.

"Melanie!" he bellows desperately. He can feel himself folding, trembling with the effort to hold the hungry back, fingers sinking into the pulpy skin around its neck, trying not to look at its horrible sunken face and the gray moldlike growths covering a good portion of its head.

"Melanie, help!"

Melanie has just enough time to confirm that the stairwell below them is clear before Daniel's hollering for help. She dashes back up the stairs, legs going like pistons, to see Daniel locked in battle, holding one at arm's length as it scrabbles to reach him.

For a moment, she really wishes he had a gun, after all.

She launches herself at the hungry's midsection. Though she doesn't weight much, she's worked up enough speed that it's enough to knock the thing back a few paces. Leaping away from its flailing limbs before it can get a grip on her, Melanie turns back to Daniel and hauls him down to the next landing. The first hungry is already in pursuit, along with a couple of its friends. Melanie considers their options, mind racing…

… and then shoves Daniel, not down the stairs, but into the corner. "Get down," she says urgently, tugging him into a crouch, "and stay still." She's done this before. It'll work a second time, right?

Without waiting for acknowledgment, hoping he'll just trust her, Melanie turns back toward the approaching hungries and holds up her hands, palms out. The forerunner pulls up short as if she's thrown up a forcefield, head beginning to sway uncertainly. Melanie stands her ground, moving her hands slightly to keep them between the closest hungries' faces and Daniel, her familiar, unremarkable scent baffling them into momentary complacency.

"They don't want me," she explains in an undertone. "They only want you." She chances a glance back down at Daniel, her expression faintly apologetic. Then, her attention squarely back on the hungries, she adds, "It's clear farther down. Move real slow. I'll stay between you and them."

Daniel fights to keep the thing at arm's length, oh god its teeth are snapping at him, this thing was once a person and it was sentient and what if it still is oh god oh god oh god -

Then Melanie is there, slamming into the thing and driving it back enough for her to grab Daniel and pull him down, away from it, and into the corner of the landing. He braces himself against the walls and Melanie orders him to stay down and stay still and he nods breathlessly and struggles to get his breathing down to a volume that isn't noisy, panicked gasping.

Perplexingly, Melanie doesn't make any further aggressive movements but simply stands in front of him like a shield. And, even more confusingly, it seems to be working. The hungries halt their approach and instead mill around, directionless, and Daniel can only stare and hope they can't pick up the sound of his heart flinging itself against his ribcage.

Then he recalls Melanie's words about "monsters" and how she could carry the nebulous "disease" - which he suspects is the causation of the hungries' current state - without succumbing to it. Her scent must be masking his. Ingenious, really, but it means they're stuck.

Still, he trusts Melanie's words in this situation. He nods, and starts creeping, infuriatingly slow, down the stairs and resists the itching urge to bolt.

A two-flight journey that should have taken little more than ten seconds stretches to ten minutes. Melanie stays put, more or less, keeping the hungries on the landing while Daniel regains some distance. The creatures are no longer on the move, but they haven't given up, either; their heads turn slowly from side to side, scanning for any obvious sign of their quarry. At least there's no breeze down here to waft Daniel's scent around. Still, Melanie doesn't dare move until he's halfway down the second flight. Only then does she cautiously follow suit, keeping her movements slow and even and her eyes locked on the hungries.

"When you get to the bottom," she murmers, "open the door very, very slowly. There might be some in the hall." The fact that they haven't already had company from that direction is encouraging, but Daniel's shout might have drawn some into the hall, if not all the way into the stairwell.

"Okay," he whispers back. God, he's terrified to say anything at all. He has no idea how sensitive these things' hearing is but if it's anything like their sense of sight, the answer is probably somewhere along the lines of really damn sensitive.

In the meantime, he resists the urge to give into every instinct that's screaming at him to bolt, moving agonizingly slowly down the bottom and to the door, all the while praying that there aren't some in the hall. Daniel has no idea what it will mean for them if there are. Objectively he does, he just doesn't want to think about it. Melanie can't protect him on all sides.

Daniel is bitterly wishing the dream had at least given him some basic tools of self-defense. Like a sidearm. Something like that would have been incredibly useful. But he's getting used to the notion that the Rift tends to be as unhelpful as possible when it comes to flinging people into dream situations.

It feels like an age before he reaches the door, which probably means he's moving as slowly as he should be, and Daniel cautiously cracks it open. He does his best to raise as little noise as possible as he peers out, scans the surrounding area.

"I don't see any," he hisses.

Melanie feels a little surge of hope at that. If they can give this bunch the slip, they might be able to make it to her room without running into any more of them. Her room, the one place in this building that was modified to be hungry-proof.

"Okay," she breathes as she edges down the stairs. "Step out there nice and slow, and hold the door open for me." The hungries have ceased following her - most have remained on the landing, and the most venturesome only made it half a flight before halting for lack of obvious prey - and she doesn't want the sudden swing of the door shutting to reclaim their interest.

She moves a little faster than Daniel did, but she has the luxury of practice (not to mention the far greater luxury of not being the hungries' food of choice). He only has to hold the door for a few minutes before Melanie edges through it - carefully, carefully - and takes charge of the door, easing it shut with painstaking slowness. When it finally shuts, it barely makes a sound.

Melanie stills for a few tense moments, listening for any kind of movement back in the stairwell, hearing none. Letting out a little sigh of relief, she finally turns her attention to Daniel.

He's definitely looking rattled - like Gallagher, he wasn't ready for this. But unlike Gallagher, he's been brave, and smart, and Melanie is suddenly struck by the realization that she likes him, soldier or no. She's so glad he didn't get bitten. She's going to make sure things stay that way.

Melanie slips her little hand into his much larger one and offers him a faint, lopsided smile. "Okay?" she asks quietly.

Having to move so slowly is still nerve-wracking but there's a rhythm to it, and Melanie's seemingly infinite calm is helping him keep the anxiety from overflowing.

The door closes and there's a stretch of silence which Daniel has no idea if he should consider that good or bad (good, he suspects, right?), and then Melanie sighs and takes his hand.

Definitely good.

"Yeah," he breathes back, half-grinning despite himself. "Thanks. I, uh, don't know what I would've - yeah. Thanks."

"You're welcome," she replies, her smile widening for a moment before it fades, making way for a more troubled expression. "It's my fault," she says quietly - an observation, not an invitation for sympathy. This is her doing, so getting Daniel through it all without the hungries taking him apart is really the least she can do. She can't quite help but sound bitter as she adds, "This is what happens if I get out."

"Really?" Daniel looks at her quizzically. "Cause I didn't see you attacking anyone. I did see you saving my life five times a minute."

He kneels next to her again. Melanie's concerns are valid, he'll give her that, but that doesn't mean she needs to cut herself off from society completely.

"Even if something like this were to happen - which I'm not saying it will, I don't think anyone would let it - it wouldn't be your fault," he insists. "There's the whole 'actions speaking louder than words' thing, I know, but that doesn't cover intent. And I know you wouldn't do anything like this intentionally. You just saved my life, I think that gives you some credit here."

Melanie gives him a dubious look. "No one 'let it' happen in my universe," she points out. "It just did. No one could stop it." She casts a haunted look around them. Even if this universe is different, she can't gamble billions of lives for the sake of getting to go outside every once in a while. Not if it could end up like this. "It's too risky," she insists, releasing his hand so she can wrap her arms around herself.

"And this is my dream," she adds, dropping her gaze to the ground. "I didn't really save your life - or if I did, it was from something I made happen. If something bad does happen to you in here, it's because of me."

"Well, okay, for one? You don't need to worry about me." Daniel smiles again, projecting reassurance as best as he can because he can't really bear to hear what Melanie's saying right now. "Might not look it, but I'm not the easiest person to kill."

Not the easiest person to keep dead would be more semantically accurate, but they just braved a raging horde of zombies so Daniel is going to leave that one where it is right now.

"For another, you can't judge yourself for what you might do or what might happen. This is a dream and we're both in it, meaning the Rift put us here. And the Rift, well. Let's just say I'm getting the idea that it has a really twisted sense of humor." His smile gets a little more grim at that. Yeah. Really twisted.

He still doesn't understand, Melanie thinks, because no sane, decent person could honestly conclude that occasional bouts of fresh air are worth the risk of this dream - this nightmare - becoming a reality. But she doesn't want to argue with him, doesn't want to explain in painful detail how dangerous she can be to good people like him.

She saved his life this time. If the hunger got out of its box, it'd be a different story.

Melanie lifts her shoulders in a little shrug, clearly unconvinced but unwilling to talk about it anymore. They aren't even safe, yet. "We should try to get to my room," she says instead. "If anyplace in here is safe, it'll be there."

Melanie doesn't seem eager to talk about it. Which is understandable. Still, that's an awful lot of self-blame for someone so young to be carrying with her. The thought makes his shoulders drop a little.

But Daniel doesn't fight the subject switch. If she doesn't want to talk about it, he won't force her, especially not after she just saved his life. The most he can offer right now is quiet support and sympathy.

"Okay," he agrees with a nod, standing again. "Think I remember how to get there from here. Think we could find something to barricade it shut?"

Melanie shakes her head. This part of ROMAC headquarters isn't (wasn't?) exactly awash with loose furniture at the best of times, and with hungries potentially around any given corner, she doesn't want to risk the noise associated with prying up something heavy and dragging it into place. "Too loud," she says. "And if there's still power, the locks on my door should go automatically."

Here's hoping her door is open in the first place. And that her room doesn't have any other occupants.

She pads slowly down the hall, though not as slowly as she'd move if there were any hungries actually in sight. This floor seems to be in slightly better shape than the one above; the puddles are fewer and smaller, easy to skirt around, and the mold isn't so bad. But there's no ignoring the derelict feel of the place; it's every bit as abandoned as the rest of the building, even if it was better enforced against unwanted intrusions.

She holds up a hand in warning as they approach an intersection, then creeps ahead to peer around the corner. Her shoulders slump a little: more hungries, half a dozen clustered motionlessly around a sorry little heap of unidentifiable scraps: the remains of their last meal. Melanie leans back around the corner, looks up at Daniel, and solemnly holds up six fingers. Then she frowns, thinking hard. They're too close to the side hall that leads to her room for sneaking by to be an option. She'll have to draw them off, somehow.

With the present threat of danger passed, Daniel can take more time to examine the space they're in and then immediately wish he hadn't taken the time to examine the space they're in, because the space they're in is incredibly creepy and abandoned and probably full of those things, and there's still the whole host of questions prickling at the back of his head concerning zombie ethics.

They don't seem sentient, sure, but that doesn't mean they aren't. It's probable they're acting instinctively, reverted to a base "eat to survive" mentality that doesn't seem to extend to actual logical self-preservation. They rely overly on smell and, judging by the clusters of them, might function in a very loose pack structure, minus the hierarchy and intelligent coordination and anything resembling a pack structure in the animalistic sense. Okay, so more like they travel in groups because it's convenient - more prey can be cornered with greater numbers (at this Daniel suppresses another shiver). Maybe that could also be attributed to base instinct, the automatic clustering for strength in numbers.

Their intelligence levels must not be very impressive if Melanie's able to invoke the "if you can't smell it then it must not be there" logic on them, so perhaps Daniel's giving them too much credit.

Melanie's warning hand halts his wandering thought process in its tracks. Then she raises her fingers.

Six of them.

Daniel swallows hard.

"Could we throw something, lead them away?" he whispers. It's an extremely basic strategy but the hungries don't seem to be particularly gifted in the critical thinking department. The issue would be actually throwing something without attracting their attention with the sudden movement.

Melanie's quick to nod. She'd been thinking of the same thing. A hurled object won't be as enticing as a live animal would be, but trying to hunt something down is out of the question. She can't leave Daniel alone, and she probably wouldn't find anything down here, anyway. This hardly seems like fox territory.

"Do you have anything small that you wouldn't mind parting with?" she quietly asks. "Something that smells human?" No matter how hard she throws something, it's going to come to a halt eventually. If it smells human, that could buy them a few more seconds of distraction.

"Um." Daniel starts searching his person, hoping the dream is kind enough to have dropped something of his into the environment along with him, even if it's apparently not friendly enough to include his sidearm. He does, however, find a radio, the sort he'd use to contact the old team for help, and privately shoots the dream a vicious spike of irritation. A useless radio but no sidearm - that seems pretty consistent with the Rift's warped sense of humor regarding Daniel's survival rate in these dreams.

In any case, it might not be good for its intended use but at least it's good for something.

"I have this," he offers, holding up the small communicator. "Will that work?"

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tw: gore and rotting flesh and general grossness FUN

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