InsaneJournal

Who: Laura and L
What: Arrival
When: Day 30, Sunset
Where: Forest's edge
Rating: PG-13 for adult implications in Laura's past
Status: Complete


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 hated 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 could cause, but there wasn't much that could hurt her anymore. 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. An eerie feeling came over her as she walked. Faintly able to see the sky, she noted that it was getting lighter, not darker. Where was the storm that she had seen on the horizon? Why did it seem that the light was coming from the opposite direction? No stranger to strange events, she did her best to ignore these anomalies at first. The trees thinned, however, and she found that she was out of the forest much, much sooner than anticipated.

Before her, a ways off but easily visible, was a set of buildings that looked more at home in Indiana than West Virginia. This turn of events was wholly illogical. Why was there a log cabin? And why was it suddenly beautiful out? She thought she had been heading towards the eye of the storm, the site of the last battle. Where was this place? And if she had gotten turned around, where was her Puppy? Noticing that the sun was beating down on her from a low angle, warming the ice that was her flesh, she stepped back into the shade of the trees. Inconvenient. Laura preferred to avoid daylight almost entirely, and avoiding people was also a preference. She closed her eyes, reaching out, trying to sense what sort of population she was dealing with. Maybe this was one of those hippie communes from the sixties that had never gotten the memo that the Age of Aquarius was over. She felt them, and for a moment her ability to sense them was trying to sort itself out, but their lives washed over her, covered her like a blanket. Stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place, between being lost and being surrounded by an ocean of the living, was an ocean of sun, no matter how faint. Hopefully she'd have time to wait for darkness before deciding what to do. Lost in her thoughts, the typically alert Laura Moon was completely oblivious to the world around her. This was one of those moments when action was required, one of those places that she always hated to find herself.