plantfood | Dinosaurs

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veronica

Dinosaurs - [Veronica]

Three weeks on the island now and Mathias thinks he's ready to leave the Compound without assistance from alcohol. He stands near the front steps, watching the trees with a faintly wary gaze and waiting for Veronica. He'd asked her a few days ago to show him the dinosaurs, thinking that he'd need those few days to prepare mentally, but even with that time he's not sure just how prepared he really is. Maybe the only thing that can prepare him for going back into the jungle is actually going into the jungle. It's not ideal, but it is what it is and Mathias can no more change the island than he can change what happened to him before this place.

The weather is warm, hot and humid, and already he can feel sweat prickling his scalp, but it's a comfort to know that no matter where he goes on the island, the Compound is never far away. Despite this, despite knowing he's in no danger here, he's learned his lesson from last time and is carrying a small pack with enough water to last two weeks and several bags of nuts he's found in the kitchen. It isn't enough to survive on for longer than a few weeks, but it's more than he'd had in Mexico. Just in case anything should happen.

Around him, there's constant movement. People coming to the Compound from their homes elsewhere on the island, people leaving, fresh from showers or breakfast, clean, warm laundry piled high in baskets. There are children in the playground nearby and he watches them for a moment, watches their parents, wonders which of them came to the island on their own and which were born here. It's still strange to him, how this place exists, but it's preferable to whatever might have happened back in Mexico.

He's early, he thinks, but it gives him time to think and to watch, two things he's very good at. So he waits, his thumbs hooked tentatively in the straps of his pack, making sure not to aggravate his healing burns.

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"Like yourself?" she guessed with a raise of her brow and an arch smile. Call it a hunch. Glancing away, she looked off through the trees, tipping her head to the side as she searched for some glimpse of the dinosaurs. It would be her luck, she thought, that she'd pick a spot where they weren't. Bring a guy out miles to see the things and they decided to play hide and seek. But then she thought she spotted movement through the trees, coming to a stop as she narrowed her eyes that way, waiting for something to emerge, just maybe.

"I enjoy the occasional cup of coffee," Mathias agrees, looking through the trees as well. He stops when Veronica does, his hand coming to rest on her shoulder unconsciously, a gesture he's used on his brother, on friends, on Jeff, even. It's a question, almost, his fingers resting lightly, waiting for her to tell him if she's seen something.

She doesn't need to. A second later he sees something, too, and his head tilts as he peers into the jungle. "Is it..." But he can't be sure what he's seeing.

There was no such sense of habit for Veronica, so accustomed to standing apart. Though she saw it coming, it still managed to surprise her, her gaze flickering to his hand on her shoulder and back into the trees, not bothering to move away. The animal, whatever it was, stayed just out of clarity a few moments longer, until Veronica was ready to change position and get a little closer. Before she could, though, it lumbered out into the open, not seeming to notice them as it grazed. "We have company," she said, looking over, just holding back a smile.

"Mein Gott," Mathias murmurs as he stares at the beast. The creature doesn't seem to notice them, something he's grateful for, because he can feel his heart thundering in his chest and although he's not scared, he doesn't ever remember feeling so excited.

"Es ist dinosaurier," he says, then realizes he's slipped into German. "Entschuldigung," he apologizes. "I'm just... having trouble with my own language right now, never mind English."

"Es ist dinosaurier," she echoed, expression somehow softened as she smiled. All that time around Inga way back when had given her good practice with a German accent, but she fumbled over it anyway. Spanish and French she could do, but German, she had never learned. "Don't worry about it. It's not every day you see a brontosaurus hanging around. Even here."

A soft laugh escapes Mathias when Veronica repeats what he's said, but even then he can't tear his gaze away from the dinosaur just in front of them. For a moment, he's nearly overwhelmed with the stupid desire to rush forward and touch it, just once, just to say he has, but he stops himself. He doesn't think that he's arrived here on the island just to die so soon.

"This is real," he murmurs softly, shaking his head in amazement. "Henrich would never believe I saw such a thing."

"Would you lie about dinosaurs?" she asked, grinning a little. It was possible that Henrich might have believed, might one day see firsthand, if her own experiences were anything to go by, but she didn't like to offer that up. Hope was all well and good, but there was no use living on an impossible dream.

"Ja, he would think I was lying, anyway," Mathias admits, knowing Henrich would never believe such a thing unless he saw it himself. It's always been that way, although he knows now there's no way at all for it to be. Not with Henrich dead.

"They just live here?" he asks, still staring at the beast with awe. "All the them? From the same time period or from all other?"

She shook her head. "I don't know," she admitted. "As scattered as everyone else here, I think, but paleontology's never exactly been my field. They just stay in this part of the island and we stay in ours." Except when they came to gawk like tourists. What else could be done when there was something like this around? There were notes on them in the Council office, left over from the people before, but that was one set of details that didn't really stick with her.

"Strange," he murmurs and for a moment, that's all. There's silence as he stares at the dinosaur, his gaze sweeping from the tip of its nose to the end of its tail and then back again. He's so caught up in staring at the thing that he almost doesn't notice when the second, smaller animal wanders into the clearing.

"I live on an island with dinosaurs," he says, then laughs, watching as the second one nibbles on some of the grass.

"You never really get used to it," she admitted, smiling a little. "I've been here nearly three years and I still don't expect them to be real." They were a fact of island life, but an out-of-the-way kind of fact, something tucked away in a corner and rarely seen, more the stuff of jokes than anything else. That they just went on like this, eating and living and ignoring the humans in their midst, was bizarrely thrilling.

"Do people get reckless? Try to touch them?" Mathias asks. There's still a part of him that wants to do just that, but he's not willing to risk his life again so soon after having it given back to him. Maybe in a few months or years when he's settled on the island, but not right now.

He would feel terrible if Veronica had to deal with reporting his death somewhere because he was stupid.

"Oh, I'm sure," Veronica said with a laugh, lips curving in wry amusement. People were stupid as a general rule. She was certain more than one of them had been tempted. "Not a lot of 'em, though. I think the teeth probably scare them off before it's too late."

"I would hope so," Mathias answers with a soft laugh at of his own, finally tearing his gaze away from them for a moment so he can smile at Veronica. "This is completely absurd and surreal. It's difficult to believe what I'm really seeing." Even after Mexico, he's having a hard time with dinosaurs.

Veronica couldn't help a small laugh of her own, glancing quickly down and back up again. "This whole place can be like that," she said. "Just wait until things get really weird and people around you are all waking up in someone else's body."

One of Mathias's eyebrows arch at that, a sudden, sharp change of expression that's rare on his face. "That happens?" he asks, because somehow that seems more impossible than dinosaurs. At least dinosaurs once existed in the world he's come from, even if it was in the past. He's fairly sure no one on earth has woken up in another person's body, no matter how far back in the past he looks.

Veronica nodded. "One of the many wonders of living here," she said wryly. "Things... change. It doesn't last forever, just a few days, but it's more than a little confusing while it does." At least, it had always stopped before, but she wasn't so sure that would always be the case. It panicked her any time it happened. Knowing the island could control her body like that was one of the few things she hated about this place.

"Now that is unexpected," he murmurs, as if they aren't having this conversation within a stone's throw from two dinosaurs. Lifting a hand, Mathias rubs his scarred fingers over the hair on his chin, then takes his backpack off slowly to get one of the bottles of water he's brought along.

"So this place... it could turn me into you?" he asks finally, after he's taken a drink and considered this. "Or somebody else?"

The degree of embarrassment that situation would cause wasn't something Veronica cared to consider. "Something like that," she said. "It's more like switching bodies, waking up in someone else's skin. You're still you. Like a Freaky Friday kind of thing." That one hadn't ever happened to her, though. Waking up as a man had been bad enough.

"That is somehow not all that comforting," Mathias replies with a small, soft laugh, looking down at the grass between his shoes. "It's a deeply personal thing, isn't it? To be inside someone's skin."

Then he laughs again, shaking his head at what he's said. "Not that I can speak from experience, really, but I think it must be."

"It goes away," she said softly, but it didn't come out as comforting as she'd hoped it to be, if only because she took no comfort from it herself. Bolstering herself up a bit, she eased down to sit, sprawled out on the ground. "I can't speak from experience either. That's not one of the things this place's put me through yet." Waking up in places where she hadn't fallen asleep or weekends spent as a man were bad enough. Her body had been tampered with enough, more than enough, and the thought of the island contributing to the list of damages incurred sat badly with her.

"Everything goes away in time," Mathias answers before he folds his legs under him and sits down in the grass as well, moving with an effortless fluidity. Digging into his pack, he offers one of the small bags of nuts to Veronica, holding them out in the palm of his hand.

"My brother always said nothing lasts, which is why he was so impulsive. He lunged at things because nothing lasts," he says, almost without thinking.

Accepting the bag from him with a smile of thanks, she drew her knees toward her, leaning against them. "Lilly was the same way," she said, nostalgia flickering across her expression. "My best friend when I was in high school. She'd do anything, consequences be damned, if it meant having fun." She was pretty sure that the finite nature of living hadn't crossed Lilly's mind, though, not until it was proved and too late. It was seriously strange to realize how long ago that had been now.

All his life, Mathias has paid close attention to people, watching them, studying them and weighing their words and movements. It's become easy for him to read people, but Veronica is different and even as she speaks, he thinks the only way he'll ever know the whole story is if she chooses to tell him. He likes that.

"She and Henrich would have been great friends," he says with a dry laugh, taking a bag from his pack for himself. "Getting into trouble together. She is not here, I assume?"

Veronica shook her head quickly, opening her own bag. "She was," she said, "for a little while. Not very long." She hadn't expected to ever see Lilly again, though. Any time with her was enough, more than she'd thought she'd get. It was one of the few things in her life she knew of where she could honestly say she'd been lucky. "Better than not seeing her again, though. She died when we were sixteen." It wasn't something she talked about often at all, but Mathias knew something of loss.

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