InsaneJournal

Who: Laura and Anakin
When: Day 10, Late Afternoon, but does time really matter in a hurricane?
What: Arrival
Where: Forest
Rating: TBD
Status: Open


Death hurt Laura. She was not talking about the act of dying; that had actually been exceptionally easy. Really, one moment her head had been in Robbie's lap, it occurred to her that oh my God, I'm going to die, and the whole nasty ordeal was over. She didn't even remember going to the hospital, though she knew that she did not die at the scene of the crash. She had waited, for some strange reason, until Wednesday morning. So, a more accurate statement would be that undeath hurt Laura. There was a constant, parching thirst in every cell of her body; there was a complete absence of heat in her frame. She had been such a warm person in life that she would murder for even a fraction of it. In a way, she had murdered for it. Blood, hitting her icy flesh, imbued her with a bit of warmth until it went cold. And in death she had learned that people were so easy to kill once you weren't so prejudiced about the whole thing. It was like they were taunting her as she was able to feel the blood pumping through the veins of the living. There was also the matter of decomposing. While she was not exactly dead, she was certainly not alive, and her body was subject to the laws of nature that affected any body. The maggots in her lungs created a nasty cough, and she felt things moving deep inside her now and then. Really, the whole mess was quite disgusting, and it was almost painful - if she could feel pain.

Death was not as painful as drinking from Urd's Spring had been. The Norns had given her the water than nourished the tree of life, and she honestly thought that she was dying again. It had frozen her insides cold, and it felt like liquid ice, if one could imagine that as anything other than water. Though she had thought it impossible, she had blacked out. When she had awoken, though, the side effects were remarkable. While the water had not restored her life, it had restored her death. Months had been shaved off of her decomposition and decay. For the first few hours, she had possessed breath, blood, and warmth. She was not alive, but she was less dead, and there was a certain mental clarity that had come to her. She knew where she must go, what she must do, and she left Ash Farm (as well as her poor Puppy, her only love) to fulfill her destiny.

Destiny, however, seemed to be wanting to throw another wrench in the works. As of late, Laura had taken to traveling under cover of the forest. While she looked, most times, like a sickly living person, she haded passing for alive. What she really wanted was to be alive. Her second largest desire was warmth, and she wasn't sure what she would do to find it. She had learned what being unfaithful to her husband had caused once already; she wasn't going to tempt fate again to teach her a second time. Karma was a bitch. The forest got denser as she traveled through it, which seemed odd to her as she should have been approaching a highway. She needed to hitchhike in order to get where she was going. Faintly able to see the sky, Laura noted that it looked like it was getting darker. Eventually, rain began to fall. The wind was picking up. Had the storm caused by the warring gods reached all the way to Virginia? Her question was answered, however, when she emerged from the forest's edge into what seemed to be a full blown hurricane. The wind whipped her hair, and several branches flew past her. Thankfully, her superior speed allowed her to avoid them. There was no highway, there was no civilization. The terrain didn't even look remotely like anything that would be in Virginia. Really, it was a little too...tropical...for that. And instead of it feeling like March, it was positively balmy.

Though she could not ignore the storm, she could weather it slightly better than a living person. The whipping water falling into her eyes did not cause her to blink, nor did she notice that it felt like razor blades. Small pebbles picked up by the storm hit her, nicked her, but she did not bleed despite the small holes in her flesh. The wind was the main problem as she walked; her body, which was no longer filled with organs and blood, but instead formaldehyde, glycerin, and lanolin, was lighter than an average person, and the high speed and force of the wind kept knocking her down. Her hair became matted, the white knit top clinging to her body now completely transparent, and her skirt actually tore. When she fell, she stayed down, her eyes unblinkingly staring at the sky. "What rotten luck," she murmured, and she closed her eyes. She focused on the auras of the living, saw their multitude stretched out before her. Some blazed like the sun, while others flickered with barely the strength of a taper. The living, they were so fascinating. The thing that bothered her, though, was that they were not as numerous as they should have been. The United States usually blinded her in her mind's eye. And, most troubling, Shadow's beacon, unique and traceable from anywhere, was not visible to her. A pause and she remembered: Shadow was dead.

"Puppy!" Laura said into the storm, her eyes shooting open. She would have screamed, but her dead, emotionless voice really wouldn't allow it. She stayed on her back on the ground, not really motivated to get up. Shadow wasn't there, and she did not know how to get where she needed to go. What was the point in moving when she'd only fall down again? "What am I supposed to do now...?" Even though she was dead, she was comprehending that the whole situation was feeling pretty hopeless.