plantfood | (no subject)

It's been nearly a week since Mathias has seen anything and it's because of this -- this weird sense of relief that has surrounded him lately -- that he walks straight into the tumbled piles of vines without a second thought. He's too busy talking to Lucy to really notice and it isn't until his feet tangle, until he feels a vine sliding around his ankle that he stops and looks down at what they've both walked into.

"No," he says softly. There's a dull thrum of fear at the base of his skull, but that's been there almost all waking moments for the past several months. He tries to remember how they've disappeared before, how it's all proven to be nothing, but even when he closes his eyes and opens them again, the vines are still there. One has circled Lucy's leg, but when he looks at it, it stops moving.

Turning, Mathias intends on heading straight to the boardwalk and toward the Compound, but the beach doesn't look like his beach anymore and he can't see where the boardwalk comes through the trees. Instead there's a hill. A path winds through the vines that cover it, bright green leaves shaped like hands and brilliant, blood red flowers. He turns away from the hill, reaching for Lucy's hand without thinking and it isn't until he's facing the water again that the arrow whistles through the air and lands only inches from his left foot.

It isn't real. That's what he keeps trying to tell himself. None of this is real.

Another arrow arches through the air toward them and Mathias closes his eyes.

Threaded | Flat

Even at first, it's apparent enough that something is wrong, though Lucy couldn't quite say what. It's just that something's off, that intangible but unshakable sense that there's something not quite the way it was before, to be worried about. People have been freaking out for a while now, with claims going around that this Halloween was going to be like the first one she lived through here, five whole fucking years ago, but so far, she hasn't seen anything. That would be just like this place, she thinks. It's nothing if not unpredictable.

Those vines, they aren't right, calling to mind something Mathias told her a long time ago, echoed in the look on his face, but though she follows his lead without a second thought about it, it's not until there are arrows whizzing towards them that she really gets scared. Months ago, he said he'd seen someone, one of the archers who'd kept him and the others on that hill, the one that's now right there. This time, there's no way in hell it's imaginary.

"Shit," she hisses through her teeth, keeping her hand curled tight around Mathias' as she tries to hurry forward. "Come on, come on, we have to — oh, my God."