Abi and Nick arrive in Vallo, and considering they had just left one deadly forest and appeared in another, are understandably confused. Special cameo by Iggy!
The orange fingers of early dawn were barely able to penetrate the deep mass of trees and greenery as Nick Furcillo stumbled forward, utterly bewildered. He’d woken up on the ground, skin so crusty with dirt and blood that flecks of it had begun to flake off, and although the first thing his conscious mind registered was PAIN, he felt none. Not really. He’d cautiously sat up, coughing a little (his throat was dry), fingers digging into the slick mud of the forest, and although Nick was a little dizzy, and although his muscles felt tired, it was no worse than waking up after a day of hard exercise. He felt more… wiped than anything.
That was concerning. He vaguely remembered getting mauled by some creature in the woods. His hand reached up to touch his side but it was smooth, unmarred by any sign of injury.
…and his clothes were in literal tatters, considering he could touch the skin above his ribs without having to hike the hem of anything up.
That was another thing to worry about, but having been satisfied that he wasn’t, in fact, wounded, his brain moved on from PAIN to ABI. Because the last thing he remembered - in a haze of strange panic and anger and fear - was her face. There was blood under his nails, he saw. Blood all over him. His curls were crunchy with it. But not from him. Had he hurt her? Why would he have hurt her? He’d liked her. Distantly, he remembered Kaitlyn, Dylan, and Ryan had been near him too, but he had no idea what had happened to any of them, either. Looking around, he didn’t recognize this place - it wasn’t the hardwood forest of New York, nor was it the tropical kind of wilderness outside of Melbourne where he’d grown up. It was entirely unfamiliar, and offered him no clues.
And powerless to remember anything, anything at all, he’d gotten to his feet, picked a direction, and began to walk.
Abi remembered more. A lot more. So when she opened her eyes to yet another forest, having just barely escaped getting eaten in one, she took the only logical action: she hid.
She might have run, but there wasn’t anything to run to. At first, it had seemed like there wasn’t anything to run from, either, but then she heard the footsteps, the ragged breathing, and both sounds coming closer. She wanted to look, see who or what it was, but she willed herself to stay still, stay down, and hold her breath. The werewolves tracked by their breath, Laura had told them. Like mosquitoes, a vaguely hysterical thought laughed out in Abi’s mind. Giant, incredibly strong, vicious, snarling, hungering mosquitoes, following them by the carbon dioxide they exhaled.
Listening a little longer, though, Abi could make a little more sense of the sounds: human, not werewolf. At last, she risked looking through the brush she was hiding behind. She was startled enough by the sight to forget all about keeping still and silent anymore.
“Nick?!”
Nick hadn’t exactly been quiet as he’d wandered - too dizzy, too overwhelmed - and so when a familiar voice suddenly rang out, he swerved his head to the direction of the sound, freezing mid-step, hands going up in front of him. To protect himself or diffuse the situation? He had no idea anymore. It wasn’t until just who that voice belonged to registered that he cleared his throat and called back: “A-Abi?”
Oh god, it was her - now that he was looking, he could make out the red tips to her hair as dappled sunlight fell onto her hiding place. Suddenly he was shaking, knees threatening to give out, but it wasn’t from fear: it was relief solid enough that he felt like he was choking on it.
Abi was alive. He hadn’t killed her. Until now, he-- he wasn’t sure. “Abi,” he repeated, sounding a little more like himself, straightening, suddenly worried for a new reason: “Are you okay? Is that--” Wait, that red hair of hers looked a little too red. “Is that blood?”
The blood on her was mostly his, Abi realized all of a sudden. When he’d…changed. She’d wiped her face off, but there hadn’t been time for a change of clothes or washing her hair after she’d shot Nick square in the chest and he exploded into a monster. And here he was alive and talking and…honestly in remarkably good shape for someone who’d taken a blast of buckshot at relatively short range and then done whatever that werewolf thing was.
“I…yeah, but I–I’m okay, I’m fine, are you? You were–” How did she even explain that? The sentence dropped off because Abi couldn’t figure out how to finish it, leaving her staring at Nick like she couldn’t quite believe he was here.
“I was--” Nick prompted, desperate for answers as desperate as he was not to hear them. Abi hadn’t come running to him just now, when she’d recognized him. He remembered that she had after the attack, had tried to get him out of there, had orbited around him for most of the night after he’d been hurt… but now she stood apart, hesitant. Abi had always been a cautious girl, but this was something else.
“It’s-- We’re not in the woods. Our woods, I mean,” he course-corrected, and gestured at their surroundings. “I don’t recognize any of this landscape. Do you?” She’d know better than he would, having the lines of Hackett’s Quarry memorized from her various sketches. Moving his arm like that reminded him that oh, yeah, he was barely a step up from naked. This morning was just going downhill at the rate of a zeppelin, wasn’t it.
Abi knew Hackett’s Quarry. She’d been drawing bits of it since she was in middle school. And while she wasn’t the expert on nature that Kaitlyn was, she could look at this forest and know that it wasn’t where they came from.
“No. I don’t…I’ve never even seen trees like some of these before. I don’t even know how I got here.”
She’d been in the Lodge. She’d talked to Dylan and Kaitlyn and Caleb. And then she’d opened the door to the camp office and then she was in the woods again feeling like the nightmare had restarted. That was an absolutely terrifying thought, now that she let it land again.
“The last thing I remember is-- being in the Lodge,” Nick agreed haltingly, although that wasn’t quite true. Did he remember being in a swimming pool? Or being caught in a trap? Or perhaps being in a cage -- oh no, right. “No, I think I- I think I woke up in a cage,” he said, a little more forcefully, “but by the time I really realized, by the time I got up -- I was in the woods. These woods. It doesn’t make sense. None of this--”
He took a breath, exhaled his frustration. There was no point in getting mad about any of this. Nick wasn’t really the type to get aggro when upset, anyhow (was he?). He looked back at Abi, setting his jaw. “We need to find help. I’m walking east.” It was the best he could do under the circumstances - hard to miss that bright yellow sun he was heading toward. “If you-- we probably shouldn’t-- you can follow behind me, if that’s--” Safer? What she preferred? “Otherwise, I’ll get help.”
“I’ll come with you,” Abi said quickly. “I mean, if you’re–if you’re okay with that? With me? Coming with you?”
God, she sounded like an idiot. But how was she supposed to say ‘hey, sorry about shooting you, I get it if you feel weird about that?’ Especially when it came with a side of ‘I also feel weird because the last time we talked you were extremely mean and then tried to kill me.’ And of course wrapped around all of it there was ‘I’m terrified of being alone.’
“Okay,” Nick said a little breathlessly, and immediately felt like an idiot for being glad of it. “I mean-- better off together, yeah?”
He hoped that was true. Between the pair of them they had no weapons, they were covered in blood, and one of them might be--- sick? Was he sick? Dissect this later, he told himself. Just head east. Which he did, carefully avoiding tree roots and thick bushes. He had a solid foot on Abi, give or take, and so he tried to push branches out of the way as they walked. He thought about saying something, but every topic just led back to the biggie: what the hell had happened last night? He’d only had one beer. Could food poisoning do this?
Abi watched him as they walked. There was none of that strange animal posture about him now, to her great relief. She didn’t know if Ryan and Laura had done what they set out to do, to cure everyone, but at least for now Nick seemed like himself. That was a comforting thought, despite the obvious mess they were in. She’d still need to tell him everything that had happened overnight, but that could wait until they got to someplace safer.
“You seem better than you were a few hours ago,” she said, a little ways into their trek eastward. “Are you feeling okay?”
His eyes slid to hers, then back to the foliage they were navigating. “Yeah,” he said, after a moment. “I don’t-- I remember that-- animal? Attacking? But…” He gestured to the tattered remains of his shirt where his skin was unmarred. “And I think…” Nick glanced back at her again, pausing in his steps, “I think I remember uh. Getting shot? But.” He laughed, a frail thing. “I mean, uh. It’s just all so mixed up. But I’m fine now. Just--” He exhaled. “Tired. Could really use a shower.”
He chewed on his lip, stepping over a log before he ventured: “I-- did you… fall? I remember-- I think I remember--” Slamming you against a wall. But that was ridiculous.
Abi had forgotten until then that Nick wouldn’t have any explanation for what happened to them. Well, not forgotten, exactly - just failed to put all the pieces together in the wake of everything they’d been through. Memory aside, Nick was gone by the time Laura got to them, and if he hadn’t run into anyone else…
“You’re gonna think I’m crazy when I tell you,” Abi said. “Or just fucking with you, but I swear I’m not. It just sounds completely nuts, so…maybe I can just explain it all when we find some civilization?”
Nick scratched his arm, flecks of dried blood fell to the forest floor, and he regarded her silently. Somehow, her saying it - admitting out loud that it was crazy - made him feel a little better. It wasn’t just him that was worried about having gone mad. That was something.
He cleared his throat. “Hey, yeah. Let’s wait. Once things are-- more normal.”
At least he had the promise of learning more later. He tried to be content with that, with knowing that hashing out whatever it was shouldn’t take place when they had no supplies nor any idea where they were. She was right. And so he stayed quiet, hoping that the woods were thinning, that they were headed in the right direction.
Abi nodded grateful agreement and followed silently behind him. She spent the next quarter mile or so trying to figure out how to phrase everything that happened so it would somehow sound less completely impossible. For once, however, she didn’t get so deep in her thoughts that she blocked out everything around her–would she ever be able to do that again? She’d been on high alert for twelve hours straight, and she didn’t think she’d ever fail to clock any suspicious noise around her ever again.
It was footsteps again, the noise that pulled her out of figuring out how to explain werewolves that didn’t look anything like the ones she’d ever heard of. Not the unnaturally fast steps of the monsters, but quicker and more confident than the pace Abi and Nick were making. It sounded more like the hunters who’d tracked them around the camp.
Without a thought, she reached forward and grabbed Nick’s wrist. “Hide!” she hissed, tugging him toward–a big bush? A small tree? Something that looked like some cover–to get out of sight. Scared as she’d been of him before, it didn’t occur to her to do anything other than try to keep them both safe now.
Nick was so surprised by her grabbing his wrist that he almost didn’t do exactly what she had told him to. Stumbling after her, he settled down beside her in the dirt and brush, letting her get more thoroughly behind the branches. He’d been injured, right? And now he wasn’t. Maybe, if he had to defend them against this hunter… or whoever it was… maybe it would be fine…? But crap. He didn’t want to fight anyone.
He held his breath alongside Abi, but after a moment when the footsteps stopped, peered out just a fraction.
The stranger didn’t look like a hunter. No, he was dressed far too nicely for that. No weapons, either, that Nick could see.
“Well,” said the stranger, “you’re unexpected.”
Nick glanced back at Abi, eyes wide, questioning. They’d been clocked (no wonder, with as clumsily as he’d hidden). Somehow… somehow he thought that this guy might be okay. He wasn’t acting as if he’d hurt them. Nor was he radio-ing anyone, or doing anything other than standing there, hands at his sides.
“Did you just arrive?” questioned the stranger politely, as if they weren’t hiding behind a bush, as if all this was perfectly ordinary, as if he ran into bloodsoaked and terrified teenagers in the woods every day.
Nick peeked back out, and saw a tiny rainbow flag pin on the man’s collar. Definitely not a hunter, he tried to communicate to Abi through pleading expression alone, and slowly withdrew from the bush into sight.
The man before them wasn’t at all what Abi had expected when she dove into the bushes. He looked…very normal? Sort of normal. An upscale kind of normal. Definitely not either a monster or one of upstate New York’s most terrifying hillbillies. He looked like someone who could be reasoned with, rather than being so ‘shoot first and ask questions later’ as everyone they’d encountered overnight.
Abi was still good and terrified, but she stood up alongside Nick, wincing in pain at the movement. Then she said aloud the sentence that had started repeating over and over in her head sometime in the night, her voice small and nervous. “Please don’t kill us.”
Nick angled his shoulder slightly in front of Abi as he watched the stranger; if the guy attacked, Nick sure as shit was going to give Abi a chance to get away. But the stranger didn’t attack. Dimly in the part of his brain that wasn’t a half-step from panic Nick registered that the guy sounded… British?
“We don’t know where we are,” Nick settled on, because it seemed like a good follow up to politely asking not to die.
Luckily, this was just the kind of situation that Ignis Scientia had trained for.