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“I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.” — John Muir
/
Between floods of dread that squeeze into her gut with each beat of her heart, Rose catches herself thinking, extremely unhelpfully: there are so many other things I could be doing right now.
Although, to be fair, anything would be better than stumbling lost down a forest trail under the dark, cold, velveteen cover of night; her panic steadily rising every time she remembers the malfunctioning face of her GPS device, and the fact that she hasn't seen another living soul since early this morning.
At least thinking in specifics distracts from wondering if the snapping of twigs off in the distance is something that intends to make her its prey.
Better choose the lesser of two evils to contemplate — keep herself from ruminating on her inability to outrun whatever might be waiting out there for her warm flesh.
/
There are houses and so many tall buildings lit up with electricity and filled with people, out there.
So many people who never made the boneheaded decision to walk up the spinal length of California, Oregon, and Washington to the Canadian border. They've never heard of the Pacific Crest Trail, much less decided on a whim to go and hike it. They’d hear blithe thru-hiker minimalizations, like: it actually only takes about five months to complete, or you start averaging twenty miles a day once you get your rhythm and, understandably, balk at the mere concept.
Those people are warm. Their socks are clean. They have flushing toilets and cabinets full of cereal and uncrushed bread. They’ve got stoves, grills, fireplaces. Heat, whenever they fucking want it, found elsewhere than the burn of a campfire or in the toe of a sleeping bag after a tumultuous night under the stars.
Those people are all playing out the happy, safe dramas of their lives, miles and miles away from where she’s rapidly losing her belief in the fact that the next campsite is coming nearer —
so close —
She just has to go a little further to reach it.
That belief is just about all she has left in the world, other than what's strapped to her back.
Rose can only put one foot in front of the other, the stands of trees surrounding her lit badly by the bluish beam of her cheap headlamp.
At least she's not truly alone. Never has been. The trail is popular enough that true solitude is hard-won. She just has to find where everyone is set up for the night, absorb herself into the fold of enthusiastic thru-hikers, and everything will be alright.
It's long since stopped feeling real, though: the fact that there are still other people in the world.
Not only the ones smart enough to stay inside. Other hikers, too, who for her entire hike so far have felt almost impossible to get rid of. No matter how deep the wilderness, on the trail there’s always a ragtag group of interesting people ready to collect her, to break into her trance of numbed grief and quiet contemplation.
Rose woke this morning in a quiet campsite in the Cascade Mountains. There’s a spectacular view of Mt. Rainier on most days, its snowy peak a welcome guidepoint. She’s about three weeks away from completing the trail, so close she can practically taste victory, and set off in good spirits for a long day of hiking uphill with a girl whose trail name was Shasta.
They lost each other when Shasta’s long legs inevitably outpaced her own. It suited the shorter girl well enough. Rose fell into a groove of admiring the wildflowers and thinking about the hazy summers she spent swimming at the public pool with Paige.
The smell of chlorine and sunscreen and green grass. Two girls who never tired of diving below the surface to find one another.
The day’s hike took her over a gentle foothill, passing both thick clumps of alpine forest and dramatic crags of rock formations. At mid-morning, she passed by the striking figure of a single lightning-struck tree in the middle of a field of boulders.
She’d noted specifically the arrangement of two twisted, blackened limbs jutting out from its trunk. Stared at the way the limbs came to tangle together only with the thin tips of their blackened branches, which were so twisted up that there was no hope of unwinding them but snapping both off from the tree.
Stuck together forever. Even in death.
An unsettling feeling had washed over her. She’d ignored it, and pressed on.
By noon the sun was beating down, drowning everything in dizzying overexposure. Cast in such harsh light, the towering wall of meadow-carpeted mountain on one side, thick forest down a steep drop-off to her other side, was surreal. A natural cathedral, in the way it drew out a numinous, awed feeling.
Rose’s backpack was extra heavy on her back. Her boots formed a strange separation between her skin and the dirt, vision blurring over the view ahead, trees and underbrush and rock and sky all blurring together.
She ate lunch alone, perched on a trailside rock, thinking how nice it was to sit and hold the memory of Paige’s face in her mind while she crunched slowly on Ritz crackers spread with peanut butter. The thought of her didn’t bring such a potent wave of pain as usual, but a dull soreness about the stomach that promised she was finally, finally, healing.
She’d been proven right. For months, when she wasn’t researching the mechanical malfunction that brought her sister’s Cessna 172 down from the sky, she was dreaming of the Pacific Crest Trail. And it wasn’t in vain. None of it was: the dreams of wet forests and mountain summits that plagued her before she left.
She needed to do this hike.
Once done, clarified creek water from her Nalgene sipped too, she tilted her face up into the sun and breathed in the stupefied calm of the noontime forest. A cloying sweetness, like overripe fruit, wafted over the damp smell of soil.
The usual white noise of the forest had calmed. The air itself stilled, void of breeze.
The forest, in its mycorrhizal wisdom, a network of billions of interconnected fungi roiling just underneath the Earth, pinging messages from morel to evening primrose to fir — infinitely smarter than Rose could ever be, ever more connected to itself than she could possibly dream — was holding its breath.
Her head emptied by the morning’s exercise, it was starting to refill with clouds and vapor. A slight quivering between the bones. A general sense of unease, elevated by the quiet of her surroundings.
She thumped her foot incessantly on the rock, barely thinking about the motion. Rose’s body felt separate from herself, a little out of her control. Like the germ of a fever was just starting to take hold.
The comforting image of her sister faded eventually and she opened her eyes, wincing after having them closed so long.
Rose blinked.
Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a strange little detail.
Among the trees, jarringly white and pink puffs were swaying slightly, as if in a wind that was not currently blowing. They were erroneous smudges, smeared on a canvas swirled with greens and browns and cerulean blue sky.
Long days on the trail had attuned her senses to disruptions in nature’s generally predictable patterns. Oddities were always worth the effort of checking out.
She thought, fuck it, it's a nice day, and decided to lose a little time exploring.
Her body felt weightless; pleasant. Walking was nothing at all, her body just knew how to do it, where to go. She left her pack behind without even thinking of it.
It was a crabapple tree that she saw, coated so decadently in pink-and-white blossoms, Rose could forgive it the sin of being mistakenly in bloom in the middle of August. It stood craggly and proud in a meadow of ferns, its dark brown, lacquer-shiny branches furred with edible-looking color.
It was rustling gently, though Rose’s sweaty neck felt no touch of the wind. The air was heavy with that too-sweet, overpowering floral scent. Mt. Rainier lurked over the pink canopy, a shimmering behemoth.
She wondered briefly why the late bloom, but it was easy to wave the thought away. Global warming, and all.
"Hello, gorgeous," she breathed admiringly, standing a respectful distance away. "Aren't you kind of lonely, though?"
It wasn’t uncommon to find full orchards teeming with fruit out in the boonies, old homestead land grown wild again, but this one was by itself. It bloomed with no hope of pollination, no promise of eventual conception. She’d never come to bear her bitter fruits.
Beneath her boughs was a little fern-free spot, an inviting place to sit and wait out the rest of the hot noon hour.
Rose needed to regain the gravity in her head. Get back on her feet and snap out of this pleasant haze.
She picked her way through the brush, settled herself there on the moss, and instead inhaled a much headier, sweeter sense of unreality.
/
One, then two hours passed like minutes beneath the tree.
It was like when she and Finn got stoned in the afternoon and lay dazed, staring blankly at the TV. Just entertained enough not to move, the not-moving itself a satisfying action to take.
Each blossom and her dance in the non-existent breeze was mesmerizing; a better show than she’d ever seen because it was accompanied by the bouquet of fragrance the blooms released.
In the very back of her head, the rational part of her was screaming. Was worried sick about her daily mileage, at how far she still was from the next nearest campsite she needed to reach.
Most of her mind, however, was occupied with dim, fuzzy thoughts like I wish I could hear this tree’s story, she’s probably seen so many things,
and
I hope being buried isn’t uncomfortable,
and
I hope they’ll forgive me.
/
After losing that couple of hours to blank admiration, her eyes sore, neck too, she spotted them.
They dangled together on twin stems, their cherry-sized bodies blushed a deep pink. It was just the single pair, their ripeness fully at odds with the presence of the blossoms.
The sight sparked a sense of elation. She greeted the crabapples as old friends: “oh, hey, guys...”
Rose reached up and plucked them down. Suspicion of strange offerings in the forest never once crossed her mind.
She did it without regret. Without feeling a thing. Once the crabapples were off the tree, her woozy headache cleared almost instantaneously. She could think in terms of actions she wanted to take, not just nostalgia and longing and curiosity about the inner lives of trees.
She tucked the crabapples into a pocket on her backpack, and continued on her way.
/
At first, Rose was unable to make sense of the scene in front of her.
She knew she’d gone the opposite way from where she’d come. Made sure to check for the mossy stump she’d passed on her way to the lunchtime rock, then turned around and headed in the opposite direction. Onwards, like she’d done every day for the past two months, over mountains and through deserts, with no problem at all.
The scenery of the past two hours’ worth of hiking had been unremarkable, so her gaze remained mostly fixed downwards, on the trail in front of her. When she stopped for water and happened to look up, there it was: irrefutable proof she’d gone hours in the wrong direction. Miles.
There was no way she could have fucked up so badly this late in the game, but it was happening.
She was staring at the artfully twisted corpse of the lightning-struck tree from earlier that morning. Painted in stark shadow against the twilight sky, it couldn’t be anything but reality.
Her stomach flooded with dread to see the twisted limbs again. In the early evening light, the interlocked limbs looked especially tortured.
/
Panic started to grow when, telling herself it’s okay, it’s basically impossible to get truly lost out here, you’re still on the trail, it’s fine, she dug out her InReach GPS device — and found it not dead, exactly, but its screen scrambled.
No matter how many buttons she’d mashed, nor how hard she’d slapped it against her palm, mumbling what the fuck what the fuck, the pixels stayed jumbled in a useless mess.
A ready explanation existed for her getting misdirected, but the issue with her Garmin wasn’t so easily diagnosable. Tears of frustration and boiling hot panicky disbelief pricked at her eyes.
The GPS was a lifeline out in the wilderness; the means by which she was able to send emergency texts when this far out of cell service. Her last contingency plan.
It’s also nigh-indestructible, in its padded home in the middle of her pack, designed for rugged trail use in all sorts of weather.
Or it’s supposed to be, at least.
She tossed it back into her pack with a “fuck you too, then,” going digging for a long-abandoned survival whistle with a shitty little compass she’d buried in there somewhere. That and a paper map and she’d be fine.
Rose found the whistle, squealing triumphantly, glad, feeling saved, when she went for a closer inspection. Her face fell immediately.
“Are you — are you fucking kidding me?!”
The tiny orange needle, never reliable in the first place but better than a scrambled GPS, was jumping erratically. Couldn’t find magnetic North if it clobbered the plastic face of the useless thing.
Now, under the cover of deep blue darkness, the tender nostalgic feeling that her lunchtime idyll gave her has long since faded. Her world has been reduced to lungfuls of crisp night air, the shadows of pine trees and the unseen company of whatever else is lurking out in the festering belly of the forest.
Rose has been hiking at least fifteen miles a day for months. Her rookie fear of the dark is long gone, but this is different.
According to her paper map, she should have reached the closest campsite to the lightning tree hours ago.
Of course, that calculation could be massively wrong. Probably is, because she’d had to make and maintain it without use of her compass. The needle hasn’t stopped jumping erratically since she checked it, right after the kick to the stomach of her GPS suddenly deciding to shit itself and die.
When she saw how badly her compass was continuing to malfunction, she’d just laughed. It sounded hysterical as it burst into the air. She keeps it in her palm anyway, the plastic warmed by her skin, its presence a small but hollow comfort.
This sort of thing would happen to Rose Tico. Something so conveniently, comically awful that it teeters on the edge of unbelievable: like the way her entire family died in a plane crash, on the one morning Rose was fighting with Paige and didn’t want to be bothered to come help with the pre-flight check, much less fly with them.
Things she could never dream might happen to her just… did. Her bedrock cracked and caved beneath her without so much as a warning rumble.
So nothing is quite out of the realm of disbelief, anymore.
For miles she’s been walking steady on, ignoring the repetition of the stands of trees and the way she’s seen the same scraggly, lightning-roasted husk of a cedar three times now.
There haven’t been deviant paths to wander down. She hasn’t done anything but walk straight forward, like she has for months.
She’s been keeping the panic at bay by assuring herself that this is the one thing she’s come to know as an unshakeable comfort, after so many weeks on the trail: the steadiness of moving forward, always heading towards new landscapes, eating up the miles left until she hits Canada.
And yet, here she is, having pushed obediently on, and she’s...
Somehow, she’s gotten herself lost.
/
When Rose looks up to check if the stars have come out, if the cloud cover has moved, the toe of her boot catches on an unseen branch and half the panic is drained out of her simply by the act of finally falling victim to something.
She pitches forward with a yelp and lands hard on her hands and knees.
Her palms are bit up, she can feel it immediately. There’s a hellish bite against the long bone of her calf, worse than any bruise she’s ever had. The uneven, rocky trail is unforgiving.
The scrapes on her knees and her legs sting at first, then start to burn bright and deep, searing her muscles with the pain of much deeper wounds. She doesn’t dare look down to assess the damage, just crouches low to the ground and tries hard to breathe.
She has to keep from crying, from panicking, because once Rose starts, she won’t stop; and crying is another waste of energy, almost as egregious as getting caught up over what all the good people in their safe, warm houses are doing with their Wednesday evenings.
The beam of her headlamp on the ground reveals a streak of blood on the dirt, which doesn’t help. She takes a few big, billowing breaths.
Her body surfaces a displaced memory, reminding her of a previous ache. Pain begetting the ghost of pain. She hangs her head and exhales shakily and the green scrum of pine that fills her lungs takes her back to the air freshener Finn always used in his truck.
/
It was Black Ice. The same fake black pine tree had dangled from his rearview mirror for as long as they dated, and ever since the first time they fucked inside of his truck, the smell of artificial woods and citrus was married forever to the thrill of getting away with doing something quick and dirty.
The morning he dropped her off for her flight to California, Rose had kept her eyes fixed on it, and on the dark highway that they passed over in a tense silence.
It had been months since the freshener gave off any smell, and months since they were anywhere near touching each other.
His old Jeep rumbled in its familiar way, threatening to lull her to sleep. The digital clock on the dash read 6:03. Rose had barely slept, she was so excited to finally leave, to get out of the house that she shared with Finn. In the wake of that one awful phone call from the state police, and then their breakup, it had become a den layered with misery.
Finn pulled up to the airport’s cell phone lot and let the truck idle, the heat running with a dusty, warm smell.
He’d bit his lip, chewing on what he was trying to say. She shot him a questioning glance, and he released a breath, deciding to just go for it.
“You don’t have to do this, you know. There are so many other things you can do to heal —”
As soon as she saw what Finn was trying to do, Rose gladly bulldozed over his quiet, measured words.
“You have the packages ready to ship, right? The list of dates and addresses?”
He tossed her a look. One that said he knew he was hopeless against her blithe determination to see this powerfully compelling new goal to its completion.
“Of course I do.” A tired smile crossed his face. “So many socks. Assuming you get to them.”
Finn was firmly in the camp that processing the loss of her entire immediate family, and the end of their two-year relationship, by hiking for months on end was not the right way to go about it.
Rose disagreed.
She had nothing left but the need to dig back into herself, after letting grief bury her for so long.
Why not lose herself to the great outdoors? Open herself wide to explore the great mystery of life? It sounded embarrassingly Eat Pray Love when she tried to explain it aloud to her wincing friends and coworkers, but to her it was more than that.
It was going to be the cleansing she needed in order to get back to society. In order to become somewhat functional again.
"Oh. I will, don't you worry," she said, all bluster, and Finn laughed weakly.
They had a $100 bet she wouldn't come home early. Rose was unhealthy obsessed with winning that prize money. She was going to spend it all on fancy Japanese whiskey and let Finn be jealous, watching her slug it down with her callused feet and her hiker’s tan.
“You can come back whenever you need. Wherever you are. Seriously. You won’t be alone out there. You can always reach me. I’ll come get you, I don’t care how far.”
“I know that,” she said, just as softly. “I’ll be alright, Finn. Really. But thank you.”
“Yeah.” He nodded slowly. “And… look. I’m so sorry about everything. I’m sorry it had to be you — and him — and that I couldn’t have figured shit out before… before everything happened, I guess. That I couldn’t just tell you what was going on inside my head. Shit, I don’t know, Rose, I’m just —”
Pain seared through her at the thought of all that had occurred to send them straight to ruin. In the end, it wasn’t anybody’s fault in particular. It was never going to work out, anyway.
“It’s okay,” Rose said, forcefully smoothing her voice. Wanting to sound strong as she left for her big adventure.
“That’s all in the past now. Expecting you to take on all of that grief with me... That was too much. I’m just glad you’re happy, now. And I’m happy, too. I just have this gut feeling that it’s where I need to be. It’s exactly what I need to do, right now.”
She smiled hard, she remembers that. In the dark, boxed-in quiet of his once comforting truck, she’d smiled, through the sting of tears and the weight of a boulder in her throat.
The rest of the memory is awash in the tidal wave of mixed feelings he’d unwittingly released by telling her I’m sorry at the 25th hour, for maybe the hundredth time in the duration of their breakup.
The meaning hidden underneath those two words, the one thing anyone has ever really had to say to her — I just had to leave you. I couldn’t not.
/
Her palms are bleeding into the dirt and tears are creeping up, but she has to dust herself off sometime.
When Rose sits down and finally surveys the damage, she winces at the sight of her gouged knees, and at a lengthy gash along the bone of her right calf. Shallow cuts and rashes cross her skin. Moss and dirt and tiny pebbles stick in her wounds.
Fuck.
There’s not enough clean water in her Nalgene to tend to all of it. Being alone, she’s going to have to walk somewhere to set up camp in the dark, and after that walk on to help. Not only with the burden of fear, but of pain and blood loss too.
That’s if she can even clear the hell-loop of the lightning tree, which is starting to feel less and less likely, for whatever godforsaken reason.
This is how you die out in the woods: making a simple mistake with nobody around to catch you. Tripping, like an idiot, with no one there to tend the wounds and build a fire and keep away the predators.
Rose screws her eyes shut, breathing slowly but shallowly. She thinks of her family.
There’s no way they can all go in such ridiculous circumstances, right? It’s got to be statistically impossible.
Then again: Rose, and her way with impossibilities.
“Please,” she mumbles out loud, voice trembling with tears as she picks her wounds clean, unable to do anything but attempt to steel her nerves against the stinging pain.
“I don’t know if you can hear me, but I need you guys.”
A loud sniffle, and then the words fall out of her with an earnestness she doesn’t fully intend.
“Seriously, if you have any ghost powers, or something, I don’t know… I need your help — this is so fucked up, I don’t know what happened to my InReach — just, please? Send somebody. Anybody.”
/
Nobody comes, of course. Because prayers whispered aloud in dark forests go unheard by all but hungry, predatory ears.
The night gets colder, and she keeps bleeding.
Rose collapses miserably over herself, watching the red ooze out in the harsh light of her lamp until she remembers that the moss is her friend, as long as it’s relatively clean. She slowly packs the worst of the gashes with it, weeping silently with self pity, and wraps them up with the last of her medical tape. She cleans up her knees with a wet leaf, then an antiseptic pad from her tiny first aid kit.
Her breath is visible in misty clouds now. It’s not yet cold enough overnight to kill, but a shelter or a fire would keep her safe from anything sniffing around the pools of fresh blood.
She’s unbelievably vulnerable like this. Her one weapon is a little knife, good for nothing but picking under her fingernails and digging slivers.
“I need the strength to keep going,” Rose requests aloud, woefully aware that the maneuvering required to pitch her tent or gather firewood is more than she can currently muster.
Time passes slowly while she waits. She calms down in steady measures, soothed by an odd sense of certainty that tonight isn’t the night she’s going to die. It simply isn’t.
“Ma? Ba? Pae-pae? Are you there?”
The gentle chorus of night creatures plays on, the slightest balm to her nerves.
Another hour passes, the moon sliding up in the sky. It’s such a pretty sight. Rose is grateful for the chance to see her make that slow journey.
It’s most likely a hallucination, but the vaguest, softest smell of smoke eventually hits her nose.
Fire.
She has to move. Get to that fire, wherever it is, the safety of its heat. The urge comes from deep inside, more an animal instinct than a conscious thought.
Robotically Rose re-shoulders her heavy backpack and leans against it, trying to get her legs under her.
The second she tries to put weight on her legs, she screeches out unconsciously.
It’s not happening. She tips her head back to hit the top of her backpack, and lets the dark hear another desperate prayer.
“Please just give me the strength to get up and keep going. I think I smell smoke, I swear I smell smoke, it's a campfire, it has to be. Please, I just have to get up.”
A pause. The sense that her request is unfinished without an offer of her own in exchange for the help.
“Take anything. I don’t care. You can have it. I’ll give up smoking, or the internet, or —”
Anything.
The word reverberates, not exactly in her head, but not outside of it, either. The word simply is. By the mere echo of that one word she volunteered to use, as if mocking her for her desperation, she’s overwhelmed to realize the enormity of what she’s offered.
Anything.
But, after all, what does she have left to give but her single, sad little life?
Maybe it’d be nice to see her family again after all, she’s thinking, when a surge of adrenaline unlike anything she’s ever experienced hits her.
As if by magic. On request.
Pure ability rips like a gunshot through her body when the dank breath of something large and alive exhales against the back of her neck.
She can’t even scream. Her throat seizes up with terror.
This is it, this is it, this is it!
The legs previously screaming with pain rocket underneath her and even with the weight of her backpack, in a split second Rose is gone, only turning once she’s gotten a few yards ahead.
Her headlamp illuminates ghostly stands of trees, sentinels on watch over the drama as Rose discovers she’d attracted, and then run for her life away from, the likes of nothing more than a curious doe.
The deer’s white tail flashes once as she arches back into the woods. Something about the unexpectedness of the movement finally rips out the scream that was caught in Rose’s chest.
She probably just wanted to lick at the salt of her blood, poor thing. Now both of them have hearts beating with the aftermath of being scared half to death.
Both continue fleeing deep into the woods, long after the illusion of danger has passed.
/
Her heart pumps a willingness to ignore the ache of her legs. They’re numb automatons working beneath her, moving just nimbly enough to carry her over the trail, avoiding further injury. If she’s bleeding through the moss, or if her injuries are worsening, she doesn’t notice.
Her mind is blank except for the dull work of constantly scanning the circle of forest her headlamp illuminates. She occasionally stops to ensure the smell of smoke is getting closer, not further away, and it is, but so slowly.
She’s been hiking at least two miles now, occasionally calling out a “hello? Hello?” To no response.
No sign of human life at all, despite the way she should be heard for miles around.
That’s a bad sign, not hearing back. Whoever is out there might not be friendly.
Her clammy hands clamp down around the straps of her backpack, as if the weighty thing is what keeps her tethered to reality. Another mile in and she’s begun to sway in her boots, legs jellying again without a threat to keep her running.
When the smoke is close enough to sting her eyes, she finally spots the other tent. It’s tucked cleverly away from the trail, nearly out of sight; lit from the inside, a small campfire smoldering untended just outside its flap.
“Hi!” Rose calls out, relief drenching her insides, drenching her voice. “Hey, I’m sorry to bother you, but, um, I’m hurt, and —”
A clipped, irritable, British-accented voice volleys back at her before she’s had the chance to finish explaining herself.
“Are you the one shrieking in the night?”
He’s inside the tent. She can see a dark form sitting up, moving towards the flap and unzipping it all the way.
He pokes his head out, a shock of orange hair cast in the warm firelight. His features are sharp and severe, shadowed generously to make for an especially striking sight.
She takes him in for a long second, and Rose’s stomach drops.
She’s seen this guy before. Albeit with much less of a beard than he’s currently sporting.
It was a few weeks ago, but it feels like it’s been a lifetime now since their paths crossed.
She met him exactly once, but that was enough for her to be glad never to see him again.
/
In Oregon, under the shadow of Mount Shasta, a group of hikers were sitting around a fire shoving instant mashed potatoes or canned tuna or oatmeal into their mouths. A rangey oldhead named Bong Water was dominating the conversation — telling stories about last summer’s thru-hike in the Appalachians, overpowering everyone’s attempts to redirect the topic.
The auburn-haired guy had been sitting across the campfire from Rose. Sullen and silent, legs crossed neatly, his spine arrow-straight. Every time Bong Water made an enthusiastic gesture, his eyebrow would tick in ever-growing irritation.
He’d stared at her for several long, shearing moments.
She’d stared right back.
Neither flinched.
Instant churning chemistry and stuck gazes over smoking flames: the beginning of the thru-hiker’s mating dance.
Rose noted the spectacular cleanliness of his red shirt, the way his collarbone dipped beneath the fabric. She was the one who had to look away first, when a terribly rolled joint was passed to her. One small inhale, and he’d glanced away, too.
When conversation eventually rolled around to trail names, Rose — or Splash, to the group — got to tell her story.
Two weeks past the Mexican border, she was telling a new friend about how much she and Paige loved swimming, even when it meant waking up at 5 AM and always smelling like the pool when their mother rushed them into trying it competitively. Having “Splash” bestowed upon her as a trail name was only a natural consequence of Rose’s heartfelt enthusiasm for the memory.
“My sister is gone now, but, ah, you know, I’m almost used to it — my parents, too, it was this whole thing —” Rose babbled on, hearing herself make no sense, feeling the tension in the group rise again: oh, God, no. She’s an oversharer.
Her auburn headed man was the one to cut into the horrific stream of feckless words.
“So you don’t have anyone waiting for you back home?”
His voice was like his face: precise in construction but so veiled in intention that she couldn’t get a good read on him. Whatever it was, the accent and the perfection of his form made him seem alien, out there in the mountains. He was smooth. Too neutral. It spooked her, made her hackles rise and her mind quicken to defend herself.
“Do you?” she’d snapped, brows folded down.
Side conversations started up, the group shifting awkwardly around the bluntness of his question, of her raw grief. The trail has a way of melting the wax seal society wraps around the worst of people’s social graces.
He’d just nodded blankly, his pink, bow-shaped mouth in a flat line. Still staring at her, but more thoughtfully, then.
That night, she’d gone to bed in the company of the three other women in the large group. She’d done all she could to avoid talking to the guy whose name, she learned, was Hugs — on account of his sparkling personality and his real name, which was either Huck or Hicks, nobody could remember exactly which.
She didn’t have a chance to really look at him, except to see his face in the firelight. The orange glow and dramatic shadows suited him all too well, but they didn’t make up for how viscerally uncomfortable his question had made her; how many shitty memories and feelings it brought back to her, when she lay awake between Twinkletoes and Deep Roots, her chest aching with loneliness.
He was off at first light while Rose was still making coffee with her legs stuffed in her sleeping bag. But now he’s here, right in front of her, in the dreamlike present, and his unsettlingly pale eyes are bright green. They flick up and down her body just once before he’s twisted that handsome visage into a cast of visceral disgust.
“Good God, what’s happened to you? Decided to take a little stroll down the side of a ravine? You know you’re supposed to walk on the trail, not off it.”
“Very funny,” she exhales, suddenly wanting to cry, because of course it would be this guy who she has to turn to, this rude creep. Of course it would be.
“I tripped and fell a couple miles back and I — I really just need some help, I don’t even know where to begin. I’m sorry to intrude on you like this. You must have been sleeping.”
“Not with the racket you were putting up.” He grumbles, unfolding himself from inside of the tent.
When he does, Rose gulps. Steps back a little, instinctively. He’s got an entire foot on her, his height supported by a lean, angular body. In a t-shirt and shorts, his pale skin practically absorbs and reflects moonlight, forming its own source of light.
“Yeah, sorry. If you’d called back to me, I would have shut up,” she grouses, ignoring the flush of heat that accompanies seeing so much of his skin, his orange-furred legs.
Out on the trail, her standards haven’t been very high. She’ll take practically anybody that’s cute and willing to wash their ass before hopping into a tent with her. Anything to sate the desperate urge for human connection. But this guy, he’d be an object of interest back in civilization, too. Attitude and all. She likes them spunky and difficult to catch. Or — she used to, at least, back when she was younger and carefree and dating men who weren’t ever good for her.
Good thing she’s already so put off by him, and that her body is so beyond the capacity to do anything but ooze and ache, or she’d be tempted to do something irresponsible.
“I’m fine, by the way.” Rose offers when he doesn’t say anything, just stares with a furrowed brow at her legs. “I just need some help washing and bandaging back up, I think. And a spot for the night, if you don’t mind.”
“Bleeding all over my tent. Sure.” He says mildly, crouching to start digging around in his Hyperlite bag. He must have paid thousands to kit himself out with all the latest, lightest technology, if his ultralight backpack and tent supported by a hiking pole are anything to judge by.
Of course he wouldn’t call back to her. Hikers like him have a fetish for shaving off as much weight as possible, staying unburdened until the end.
Maybe he’d even hoped she wouldn’t see his camp, tucked away in the trees.
Rose, on the other hand, carries around Paige’s old stuffed pig and a bed roll and tent she got at a consignment shop. She makes room for cereal bars and Pop Tarts by diligently washing the same three sets of quick-dry clothes on a rotating basis. All up and down the trail are hikers who know her for her easy laugh and her generosity with snacks. She can’t imagine not wanting to rush to someone’s aid.
What a dick.
Thankfully, even as he’s reaching out to touch her, to help remove her backpack, her attraction is put off by the idea that he wanted to hide from helping her.
When the weight is removed from her shoulders, Rose melts with a moan of relief down to the padded forest floor. It’s so good to be with another human, even if his presence sends a chill down her spine. Her entire body is sore from lugging twenty pounds on her back, and the warmth of the smoking campfire is so wonderful to her tired, battered legs. They jitter even when she’s trying to relax, a nascent urge to flee Hugs’ camp in search of somebody more welcoming being flushed from her exhausted mind down to her muscles, where it’s easy to ignore. She writes it off as having a case of trail legs — wanting to keep on moving forward, always forward, marching up and up the impossible length of half a continent.
Now that her sweat’s had a chance to cool, she hadn’t realized how chilly and damp the night really is, how fragrant with green pine and smoke. She wraps her arms around herself and shivers from both cold and pure relief. There’s enough adrenaline pumping through her to prevent much of the pain from her wounds from biting through, but it’ll come.
The moss that’s left after her stumbling is all brown and sticky. She can’t even think about it right now.
“No wonder you tipped over,” he snarks, the sound of her backpack smacking onto the ground with its familiar thud, the clatter of zippers and multitools and charms attached to every free ring and tab. “I’m sure this pack weighs half as much as you do.”
She might be inclined to laugh at the ribbing, but his tone is anything but playful.
“Felt like it, for those last couple of miles,” she sighs, clipped and careful.
Hugs takes a seat next to her. Not too close, but not far away enough for comfort. Rose looks again at him, and has to suppress a gasp of instinctual fear.
The beam of her headlamp hits him square in the face, washing out his features, worsening the effect of his eerie pale eyes, leaving her cut through with a cold wind as physical as those that caress her clammy, work-warmed skin.
He squints in the brightness of the light, she remembers herself, and Rose sweeps the headlamp off her messy hair with a squeak.
“Sorry, sorry,” she rushes to say, stomach dropping to see his face in the much more flattering firelight. “Um — yeah, thanks for letting me park here. It was such a fucking insane day, you wouldn’t believe.”
“Clearly,” he deadpans. He’s reaching towards her calf, and she wants to flinch away, but she doesn’t, sensing he doesn’t mean harm in the gesture. He picks at a string of moss and starts to gently pull it from the sticky mire.
“Do you not carry bandages, or do you simply crave turning into some sort of pus-ridden forest creature?”
She won’t entertain that with an answer, not when she whimpers out loud at the sting of having her wound disturbed. He smirks, as if that’s answer enough in itself. “Lucky for you, I’ve got some to spare.”
“That’s kind of surprising,” she lets slip, gasping again as he picks another piece of moss off of her with a droll “oh?”
“You seem like a real lightweight, is all.”
“I pack lightly, not stupidly.”
She can’t come up with a retort. Partially because he’s right, it is stupid of her not to have sufficient bandages, just like it’s starting to feel like it was stupid of her to leave her nice civilized life and hike this trail in the first place. And partially because she’s absorbed by his gentle but brisk way of picking her clean of the moss and pebbles and dirt.
His fingertips are noticeably pink in comparison to her tan legs. They work efficiently, and without her express permission. She doesn’t tell him to stop, though, because she really doesn’t want him to. It’s so nice having someone tend to her. To be able to submit to brusque care, to become the vulnerable and soothed one. Things must be dire if she’s looking for a protector in this guy, but Rose finds that she doesn’t really mind him, as long as he’s doing this for her. She’s rapidly starting not to care at all who he is, only that he’s being kind enough to help her, no matter if he’d wanted to or not, no matter the rapidly quieting alarm bell that his presence rouses in her mind.
She lets him touch her, his palms skating over the muscles of her calves. Enjoys it, even, that casual human touch.
It is what it is. Things change fast out here.
When he’s done, a thumb drags across her skin, drawing a clean streak through the blood and dirt. He’s satisfied with his preliminary work, but there’s a tinge of frustration there, too.
“You should pay more attention, next time,” he says. “You have pretty legs, and you need them, out here.”
A roll of heat mixed with revulsion shakes through her.
“I’ll try and remember that,” she grits out, staring wide-eyed at him, knowing she needs to slam down her boundaries but finding herself unable; unwilling.
“Good,” he says. Under her heated gaze he moves his halted palm once more. Lifting it, as he rises and ducks into his tent to rummage through his pack. Rose watches after him, hungry for company until he returns with a first aid kit and a small flask. He sits before her, keeping the first aid kit to himself, and handing her the flask. It’s engraved with a word she doesn’t recognize, the lettering crisp along the bottom line of the steel — agesander.
“That your name? Agesander?” She asks, tipping the flask up at him as she takes a swig of the whiskey. The burn in her throat just about cancels out the burning of her legs as he applies hydrogen peroxide to her wounds, and when she’s swallowed down her shot the strangled hoot she lets out is from the dual pains.
Hugs looks up at her from under thick orange brows. His mouth takes on a shape that sort of resembles a frowning smile, but subtle enough that she can only pick up on it because the rest of the time his expression is so implacable.
“You could say that it is.”
“Huh?”
He doesn’t elaborate. She doesn’t like that odd smile on him. Especially not because it stays in place while she whines in pain at his insistent treatment, the dabbing of ointment onto sensitive skin.
“Weird fuckin’ name,” she grits out, and toasts him sarcastically before taking another small mouthful of expensive-tasting whiskey. “You wanna hear about the day I had?”
“I suppose you aren’t giving me a choice in the matter.”
“Not really.”
“Tell me everything,” he says, softening, meaning it.
She lets it unspool in a long tirade, closing her eyes and enjoying his touch as Hugs wipes the rest of her legs clean with a corner of his microfiber camp towel soaked in water. It feels so good, there isn’t any question of whether or not she’d let him take that wide step into intimacy without so much as learning her real name, first.
The longer she talks, dishing every terrifying detail to his stonelike, patient face, the more she gets comfortable speaking to him. He looks up in short snatches, always under those brows. He listens well, asks leading questions, asks her to clarify, gives her back the lost thread when she rambles — but he doesn’t believe her, she can tell that much. The patronizing gleam would be clear even in total darkness.
She doesn’t care. It’s so good to tell her story that it wouldn’t even matter if he didn’t understand her at all.
“Something is wrong with reality, I think,” she whispers in hoarse conclusion after her story comes to the third repetition of the lightning-struck tree. “That’s the only thing I can think of. I don’t know. It’s just not possible.”
“It’s certainly possible,” he shrugs. She frowns, hating how attractive that low British droll is. “Reality hasn’t shifted, you know, just for you.”
“Maybe it has! Who the hell’s around to say otherwise, except you?”
“Sure, sure. And you didn’t simply wander in panicked circles, like every hiker’s done once or twice.”
“Fuck you,” she mutters. “I’m not lying.”
“I’m sure you aren’t.” He shakes his head, dismissive. Hiding something. She can’t pierce through her own mental cloud enough to form an argument strong enough to make him believe her, but her ardor seems to superficially affect him. He’s thoughtful, behind the disbelieving male bravado.
Now her calves are washed and bandaged, too, thanks to his towel and his efforts. This clean deliverance from the terror of only a few minutes ago feels too good to be real. He’s moving the towel up the side of her knee with careful strokes, wiping at the edges of her thighs when she adjusts enough to allow him that sliver of access.
“Do you have a girlfriend?” She asks, saying fuck it to shyness and civilization. This is the middle of the woods, the middle of nowhere. The trail is a different world entirely than the one she left roughly four months ago. If she can’t have good food and running water, then Rose will at least take full advantage of the opportunity to exercise her most base instincts without the judgment of anybody other than him.
“No,” he says, a dark little pull to the edges of his lips for a flash of a moment. “No, I haven't. Have you?”
“No.” Finn fleets through her mind without even a scrap of pain or resentment attached to his image, and just like that: he’s gone. “Nobody.”
She looks at him for a long, long moment. Trying to size up this situation, see if following her impulses will serve her here, or hurt her.
In the end, she’s never been particularly apt at controlling herself, especially when he’s rubbing her thighs, taking tender care to wipe the mud off her skin.
“You’re touching me like you’re trying to fuck me,” she says, leadingly. Spreading her thighs a little more, though she’s conscious of the fact that she probably smells like three days’ worth of hiking sweat.
“You’re very astute.”
“And you’re not subtle at all.”
He flashes a look like a frown but not quite, lips pinching down with some amount of humor, and asks, “have you still got the crabapples?”
She shoves a hand into her pocket, but hesitates at the last second before bringing them out.
“Why? What does that have to do with anything?”
“You mentioned their tree earlier, the pink and the rattle in the leaves or some such. I assume you’re delusional, but — if the crabapples are real, then perhaps you saw the lightning tree three times, too.”
His logic doesn’t make sense, but she can’t put a finger on why. It’s a challenge, though, and she knows she can beat it, therefore she must. There’s a moment of dread, of don't do this Rose, of please let them still be in my pocket before she finds the crabapples’ hard round forms, but she produces the twin fruits with a flourish.
“See? All real. Fuck you.”
His eyebrows raise a quarter of an inch, mouth puckering the slightest bit before he re-neutralizes. The skin around his eyes tightens. “Interesting.”
She deflates a bit after the victory, not knowing quite what she wanted out of it. Perhaps a convenient explanation, an easy joke for her to banter with: anything but his tense silence.
“Yeah. Exactly. Interesting. Worst day of my life and you think it’s interesting.”
“I’m sure it’s not the worst day of your life,” he murmurs.
She recoils from the phantom punch to the gut. “Of course it isn’t.”
“Truly terrible — really tragic, about your family — about Paige,” he says, one hand clasping her knee while the other rubs circles on her thigh. Rose never would have called her Paige, even in company, always Pae-Pae, but the fact that he knows her dead sister’s name already unleashes a flood of relief in her gut, instead of the dread that should accompany it.
Oh my God, he gets it. He knows about them.
“Thank you.” Her voice is a hollow whisper. “It’s been really, really hard.”
“I know it has,” he croons back, just as softly. Something impossibly rigid that’s been straining in her chest for months now starts to crumble, and it hurts, but it’s good, too.
“You’re very tired, aren’t you?”
“I’m doing alright. I’m trying my best.”
He doesn’t respond. Maybe he can tell that she was lying. That she’s about to fall apart in the worst way, and he needs to pick up the pieces, and he’s probably not good for so much as a half-hour conversation but all of a sudden she needs him like she needs air.
The way he’s efficiently cleaning her skin is a deeply unfortunate turn-on. It’s unlike anything she’s ever experienced. It should be uncomfortable, being given a wipedown by a stranger, but in reality it’s the most intensely erotic thing she’s ever experienced in her life. The most intimate.
Rose shivers, watching him. He’s staring down, fascinated, as her skin emerges from layers of grime.
“Are you going to eat them?” He asks out of the blue. The question is posed casually, but she clocks the gravity in it instantly. Like he’s speaking around something heavy and anticipatory in his throat.
“What — the crabapples?”
“Mmhm.”
“I hadn’t thought about it.” He stops wiping for a moment, and she can’t bear it. She drops a hand to his wrist. “Don’t you wanna help clean the rest of me?”
She isn’t usually so bold, but the strength of what was at first revulsion and intimidation and gratitude has melted into curiosity and yawning arousal. He nods toward the crabapples dangling in her hand, their cherry-red bodies looking tempting although she knows they’re extremely tart, not very good raw.
“It’s a small matter, Rose, of the fruit but I must insist you choose whether or not to partake.”
She narrows her eyes at him. Takes a moment, listening only to the wild beat of her heart and the passing of breath through her lungs, and lets wordless knowledge from an indefinite source fill her.
This is a crossroads.
He waits for her to make her choice. His movements turn slow. He won’t hold out for long, though, judging by the tick in his eyebrow. Doesn’t he know what she’s going to say already? She’s still scared of him, but the thought of doing anything else — being anywhere else — is growing further away by the second.
Her lips are sealed shut and opening them is a labor she must consider before it happens.
“... are you going to hurt me?”
He shakes his head, a small but solemn gesture. “Never. I will destroy those who seek to cause you harm.”
This satisfies her, deep in the blood. She nods, then asks, “and will I ever get to return?”
She doesn't know where the question comes from. It sounds ridiculous in her small, crackling voice, but he’s gentle and serious when he answers her.
He looks up at her, pale green eyes boring into hers, and in them she finds darkness and fear and comfort all in equal measures. "Not without me, darling. We’ll have to keep together.”
Everything feels suspended in midair, fragile, even the crackling fire and Hugs’ steady stroking working up her willing thighs. He passes under the hem of her shorts without so much as a questioning glance, and she’s so glad that she lets him hear her groan of relief instead of holding it back.
For a while longer, she cannot speak. She tries to divine the right answer out of him but all he gives her is the same flat, expectant look.
Rose can’t remember quite what’s waiting for her, out in the real world. Images come, meaning nothing: warm beds and fancy cocktails and big emotions and parties and loneliness and Finn and Rey and hope for the future and pain of the present. In the time it’s taken for him to settle next to her and tend to her wounds, she’s released all concerns except breathing through the rapidly fading aching pain of her legs, and fighting the urge to crawl into this strange man’s sleeping bag and rest awhile with him.
She glances suspiciously at the dangling pair of crabapples pinched between her thumb and forefinger. Everything in her life has dragged her towards this moment.
“It’s just fruit, right?”
“Sure it is,” he says, expression breaking into a broad, smug grin as she pops the first crabapple into her mouth. She's always liked to do things on impulse, as her body and her instincts guide her.
She chews, mouth rushing with saliva around the intense sourness, and he grips her thighs in two eager hands. “Both?” she asks, after swallowing painfully, seeds and all, too warmed through by the whiskey for the cleverness of spitting out the tiny things.
“If you like.”
I would, she thinks, so down goes the second fruit, and she smiles at the way that the crabapple makes flowers explode in her blood. Her whole body shimmers with a feeling that's too big and too beautiful for her mortal skin. It’s hard to breathe, all of a sudden, menthol sharp lungs that don’t work right. She’s drained entirely of a grief that was so heavy, it formed a boulder inside of her. She’d grown so used to it, over all those transcontinental miles, that its lack forms a physical presence of its own. She could tip over from having her balance so rudely thrown off.
“Holy shit,” she slurs. “Those were not normal fucking crabapples.”
She wants to see if he’ll smile that way again, and oh, yes, he does.
“Of course they weren’t normal fucking crabapples.”
Too late, she catches the greed in it. The hunger, and the predatory glee. Her stomach drops for the umpteenth time since she woke up what feels like several lifetimes ago.
No, her helpless logical side shrieks, from its locked cage in the darkest recess of her brain. What did you just do?!
That small part of herself is so easy to ignore, though. He’s already untying her boots, then removing her socks. She doesn’t see why she shouldn’t let herself be stripped by him; she wants it so badly, after all. He tugs her shorts down with her assistance, wiggling her hips free of the cumbersome pink garment. She’s awash with strange energy, pulsing with it, a tingling that drips down into every last cell of her. Her eyes sting with tears from pure force of emotion.
“You won’t leave me, will you?” She asks, feeling stupid because it’s the most important consideration and she didn’t think to pose it until now, but Hugs, this trailside enigma waiting to entrap her with his curt but tender care, is patient. He understands. He knows.
“I carry away all men,” he explains, a solemn vow. His finger is hooked in the elastic of her panties, but he’s looking earnestly up at her face. “Nobody escapes me. You needn’t worry about being alone again.”
The wonder of hearing it and knowing with a faith she’s never experienced before that it is true makes her so happy that a few tears fall, cold and joyous.
This skinny hiker in a red t-shirt is talking like he knows something about eternity, like he’s Death itself. Rose finds herself believing him. She’s always approached the world with an open heart and a cosmic mind. The only thing she’s surprised by, now that she’s sitting by his fire, deep in the heart of this dark, unknowable forest, is that even her very last concern feels small and petty.
"It’s just — I don't want to die yet," her trembling whisper comes.
"No. You weren’t meant to be smothered in death, trod upon and aggrieved," he says, "but to consort me. To be my living equal."
"That sounds nice," she responds, not knowing why it does, not knowing why she hardly reacts except for a flutter in her stomach when he says consort me. “I like how you make that sound. You have a pretty voice.”
“Good. It will be very nice. I’ll make sure of it.”
She does not know what grounds she treads upon now, either, but she does know that something has happened which cannot be undone. She thinks of a plane falling out of the clouds, meeting the ground, the way it feels so much like a fundamental, inevitable horror, a crushing grounding that was always calling her name.
Still, she loves having committed the transgression. Having given herself up to something, finally, though in a way she’s known, all along, that this is where she needs to be, where she was always meant to end up. Here, his kind hands and his camp towel making short work of washing her uppermost thighs, her hips, her belly. Skipping her cunt but not tearing his eyes from it, lower lip dropping down when she spread her legs a bit to give him room. She might have been self-conscious of this, in another life, but it's the easiest thing in the world to bare herself to this stranger.
“I don’t usually make people promise not to leave when I first meet them,” she says, “but I don’t usually do this, either.”
“I’d hope not. You're mine, only, aren't you?"
"'m not anybody’s, asshole," she attempts, but he's right, and they both know it.
"Sure. You feel it too, though. I know you do."
She nods, helpless. Wondering if it’s the fruit, or if it’s her, but that doesn’t matter any more. That’s so small. Infinitesimal.
More important: it’s warm by the fire. So much so that when she shucks her shirt and ragged sports bra off, she’s comfortable, the ruddy glow etching a trail of heated skin that he follows with his rinsed-and-wrung towel. She wants him to touch her like a lover, not like he’s giving her a bed bath, but when she grumbles about it he merely pinches her nipple and chides, “I want you clean,” and when she asks for what, he says very gravely, “for sleeping in my tent. My things are clean and you are not and I’d like to help you keep warm, ergo —”
“Whatever,” she relents. “That’s fine. Just hurry up.”
She doesn’t know how they’ll both fit in that one-man tent, but she supposes not sharing a sleeping bag isn’t an option anyway. No part of her would allow for that.
It’s been so long since that part of herself has risen to the surface. It’s a homecoming, letting herself be seized and soaked by pure wanting. Like when she plucked them from the tree, eating of the fruit seems to clear her mind, sharpening her purpose.
He works his way up her belly, beneath her breasts, and then her breasts themselves, not stopping to touch without the express purpose of cleaning her, though the way he hefts each tit in his hand, and strokes it carefully to ensure she’s thoroughly taken care of isn’t entirely clinical, either. It continues to not make a lot of sense, especially the way her body keens for him even as he’s acting more like a nurse than a lover, or whatever he is to her now. She surges up for a kiss, trying to twist the situation back into normalcy, but he turns his head: “when I'm done, Rose, I'll lose my place,” he says, and her eyes flutter shut. Of course he already knows her real name.
“Your name isn’t really Agesander, is it?”
“... it’s a title.”
“You’re corny.” She waves the flask at him and he splutters; she laughs, nearly out of her body with joy and pleasure as he massages her arms. “Whass’ your name, then, lover boy?”
“Armitage.”
“Hugs?”
“Hux.”
“Wow. Maybe Agesander is more elegant,” she giggles, head tipped back, his grip on her arm tightening but not by much, only increasing the effect of the massage as he diligently scrubs her of dirt and blood and debris.
He reaches her shoulders, and it’s there that she notices him looking for signs of distress from her. Finding none, he clasps a hand loosely around her neck, his towel making quick work of it, one moment lasting eons as his palm passes over her thrumming pulse, the cord of her throat crushable and jumping as she swallows hard.
And he’s done. He leans back, raking his eyes over her body. She’s never been so immediately comfortable with a new lover before. Instead of bashful, all she feels when she watches him take her in is pride: at her own apparent beauty, reflected in his eyes, and equally so for having survived long enough to meet him here in this moment.
Rose uses a clean spot on the towel to wipe her hands, then takes her Nalgene and uses it to wash her face and between her legs. Squatting low on flat feet, she drizzles the cold water over herself and gasps at the shocking pleasure of it, cleaning the contours of her cunt with her fingers.
“God, I miss showers,” Rose sighs. It feels so good to be clean, even if her bare feet are flecked with detritus from the forest floor, pine needles and tiny leaves clinging to her wet skin.
When she glances up, he’s tearing her apart with his gaze. It’s too much, but if he ever looks away, she’ll end him.
She starts to shiver again. The fire is dying out, and she needs him to touch her.
“Let’s get inside,” she says. “I think I’m as clean as I can get.”
He helps her up, his hands clasped about her hips, but the ache of her legs has already dissolved so far that crawling inside the claustrophobic tent causes no pain. He follows right after her, hesitating in the entrance while she settles on his mattress pad, flipping a section of his goose down sleeping bag over her legs.
She’s up on her elbows, and close enough to nudge his thigh with her foot. “Isn’t it time for us to consummate this whole deal? Get in here, dummy.”
His hand comes to rest loosely on her ankle. He tilts his head a fraction, all in shadow but for the weak vestiges of the campfire smoking and sputtering behind him.
“Unless you don't want to,” she tacks on, "or if you — can't? Maybe? I don't know — I hope you can."
“You don't need time to recover? Your legs —"
“I’m fine. More than fine. I want you.”
His grin is slow-curling and scary and she wants to lick it off his face, into her mouth, into her, for parsing and preserving, safe in the hollows between her ribs where grief and horror used to live.
“Please,” she exhales.
He moves quickly, then. Maybe senses her urgency, and her perfect willingness to move aside and give him room where there is none, to settle her naked body along his clothed one, to ruck aside the sleeping bag and welcome his heat in the chilly dark. She whines at him to close the tent flap, and with a quirk of his lips in the low, dim light, he leans up and fumbles for the pull. The familiar sound of the zipper, stuttering as he yanks it closed, the yip of it, is a pleasant signal to her body of her favorite part of the day: relaxing inside the protective cocoon of tarp and mesh. An artificial barrier between herself and the inviting mystery of the nighttime forest.
He seals them inside together, settles back, and then it’s black and quiet between them.
Rose could melt into the moment. She could crystallize it and worry it in her hand forever.
But she’s never been one to wait, when there’s a lively body next to hers.
She lifts his shirt and licks his nipple. Flicks it with the tip of her tongue, seeing if he likes it.
When she hears him groan softly she keeps going, kissing down, trying to get him to do that again. She’s not disappointed.
Pulling desperate noises out of him — making him feel good — fills her with such perfect happiness for the first time in so long that her body doesn’t recognize what it means to be free of every painful tether in and outside of her.
Needing more of the reassurance of his solid presence, she curls into his bared chest, traversing his skin with a brush of the lips. The slope of his neck to his shoulder forms a spot where her nose notches perfectly. She shoves it in there, breathing deep.
They’re still not close enough for her taste. Rose wraps her arms around him, giving him barely any room to shimmy his shorts off, but once they’re kicked free he gathers her against him with the same ardor, the same disgruntlement at every gap of body heat and empty space that keeps their bodies apart. His hands smoothing down her hair, measuring the length of her back, rubbing warmth into her gooseflesh arms.
She might have expected his skin to be cold, to give off some sense of his inhumanity. In reality, he’s warm palms skimming down her side, the curve of her hip. He brushes back up from her knee with a single fingertip, tickling a path up the join of her thighs; he crooks the finger and pets it through the dark curls there.
“I want to kiss you now,” she says, and wordlessly he meets her mouth with soft lips, his nose bumping hers. It’s fierce, the fluttering energy beating inside of her calling to his rigid, dead calm. She draws him to her with hands on his short wiry beard and before she kisses him again, mumbles, "why do I feel so much better when I'm with you?"
He plays with her hair, knotting it loosely over his fist. "We were all made in pairs. Wandering, trying to find the split half."
It's not nearly as hard as it should be to swallow this strange truth. The idea that he completes her, somehow, and she him. Bright summer loveliness to compliment the clutching, destroying cold of winter.
"Took you long enough to find me," she grumbles. His chest vibrates in a short laugh.
"Rose, my love.” He whispers her name against her forehead. “I was meant to be the ground you spring from."
Something deep inside of her remembers this, remembers it with a soul-deepness that goes beyond words. Remembers, too, in this way: kneeling on a shiny floor, blood and tendon in her mouth and a war that swallowed them both; the precise split of his feet in a steady stance as he gazed out at the blackness of stars. The smell of his neck and the way he said — says — her name: sharply, a haughty prince at prayer, invoking the name of a terrible goddess.
How many lifetimes have they taken to come back here, to reach each other? How many times has she had to endure Hux, in his grasping greedy loneliness, taking everything from her in order to bring her to him?
It doesn't matter, really. He's here now, and so is she, and his lips find hers in the dark.
She breathes deeply as he kisses her. Campfire and dried sweat and whatever irresistible spice he radiates that keeps her chained to his side, after endless eons.
Her thigh slips over his hip, his hand sliding to palm her ass. His cock presses into her belly, and her hips jerk, cunt seeking purchase against him. She finds it and jerks again, aligning her body flush and close as possible to his. In one curious hand dipped down to feel out the dick she may have just chained herself to for eternity, he's dizzyingly pleasing. He gives an involuntary twitch of the hips when she clasps her hand around him, thumb massaging over the slit on his head that leaks a drop of pre-cum, then another as she spreads the first down to the sensitive spot at the fork of his skin.
Trembling with cold before, it's all from stimulation now as she rubs her clit against the thick ridge riding along the underside of his cock.
"Been saving it for me?" She asks, a hot rush of breath, and she can feel his responding mocking smile against her forehead, his rumbling exhale — his version of a laugh, she thinks. It makes his cock twitch in her hand, and against her clit.
“All for you,” he says, low, dragging her hand by the wrist down from the fascinating work of feeling him out, solid and thick but not terrifyingly huge, to cup his balls. She laughs, the sound sharp and gleeful in the confines of the tent, and squeezes. He hisses; a soft bitten-off “fuck,” and she massages his sac, pressing her thumb into the base of his cock, feeling how stiff but sensitive he is there, still laughing — then kissing him, because he’s caught her lips with his, open and wet, tongue invading her mouth. Another roll of her hips, one that he responds to in kind, dragging his shaft along the lit-up nerves of her cunt.
“I’m gonna drain you,” she nearly sing-songs. Kisses him again, his response eager. “Hope you’re ready to keep me well-fucked. My last boyfriend —”
“I don’t give a shit about your last boyfriend,” he growls, nipping her bottom lip, grinding hard into the slip-sliding rhythm they’ve established. Her grip flutters down the slightest bit, and rocks her hips to get more of that star-bursting behind her eyelids, running along the sinews of her thighs.
“Going forward, if anyone fails to so much as lay flowers at your feet — if they don’t sing your praise in high chorus — I’ll carry them straight off. They will have to beg for your mercy.”
She resists the urge to giggle at his violent sincerity, because she knows he means every word of it. and she loves it, too. Can't belittle what makes her feel so cherished, adored; worshiped.
“That’s really hot, but can you, like —” she grunts, starting to roll them over, wanting to be on her back, needing his weight on top of her, inside of her. “Hurry up. We can talk when you're in me.”
He follows her lead, settling over her, fitting his hips between her spread thighs. “Need me, do you?”
“Yes. Clearly. Feel how fucking wet you get me.”
She can sort of see his face, in the dim light, the high points etched in moonlight filtering through a mesh window flap. There’s just enough visibility for her to see the way his mouth drops from its smirking pinch to open awe as she takes his cock in hand and smears his head against her. The motion — she doesn't expect it to feel half as good as it does, pleasure shuddering out from every point where she's rubbing him against her. It's supernatural, the cleanliness of the feeling. The strength of it washes through her, a new path carved, made by and for him alone.
His hand slaps down onto her hip, her skin painted pale by the moon, holding it for dear life as she fits him against her entrance, then: enjoying herself, enjoying the way he hangs his head in defeat, she pries him away from her.
“See?” When she peels him off, a string of slick follows, a glint in the light. It’s so alien to what she knows as the usual process of her body that the excess of wetness is fascinating; yet another unexpected discovery on this foreign land. "Nobody's ever done that to me before."
“Better not’ve,” he snips, voice torn up by want.
“Better not?” She can’t help mocking back. “You’re not the only man in the world, you know.”
“I am, now, to you.” He says simply, not even aggrandizing, not even smirking from what she can tell — only speaking truth to her, like he knows just how badly she needs to hear it told that way. No room for quibbling, no requisite hemming and hawing over what both their bodies already know as gospel.
“Oh, fuck, I think you’re right.”
She guides him to fit himself back against her cunt; needing to shift on top of the blow-up camp mattress, to tug the sleeping bag out from under her so she doesn't slide on it. He makes a trembling noise, desperate, hungry. A whine that disappears into the skin right beneath her collarbone as he arches his lanky back, grips her hip in his big hand, takes a handful of her hair in the other, pulling gently on her scalp — how did he know that's my favorite thing? — and shoves forward.
Splitting, stretching. Whiteness around the edges of her vision, her hands on his ass and his back both digging nails into his pale flesh. She didn’t expect him to be so much to take up her cunt. In her hand he was so manipulable, easy to fathom, but one stroke and he’s not all the way inside; two, the second a little more forceful, accompanied by his grunt of effort, and Rose is swallowing her breath to make room for him.
He pulls her back into the present with a small tug on her hair. Peering into her face with bright green eyes, swimming, searching for her. Hesitating a moment, on hearing the sound he tore out of her.
“‘m good,” she murmurs, squeezing his ass to get him to move. He thrusts shallowly, barely, more like he’s finally sinking all the way inside than starting to properly fuck her. Still, it makes another long noise leak out of her. He pauses again, her cunt tightening on him, his hand on her hip grounding her down to the camp mattress, the tarp floor with its usual specks of natural detritus. The hand she’d slung over his back flutters down to land on top of his, her fingers pressing his into the wide swath of her hip.
She wants bruises. Wants him to mark her as his for all eternity. Wants more than just the ephemeral stretch of his cock, even more than the promise of his seed warming inside of her.
There's a void that drains from him into her — an endless psychotic craving that feels entirely foreign until it burrows a home in her chest, and then feels like the most natural thing in the world.
“You feel so good —” she sighs heavily, belly rising to brush against his. “—but I need —I’m gonna break if you don’t fuck me— please —”
He barely lets her finish. He snaps his hips, pulling nearly all the way out before driving inside again. Her hand curls around his, and his fingers curl into her skin.
A final, sharp tug of her hair, then rubs her scalp and cradles the side of her face, practically fitting half her head in his hand. “That what you want from me, love?”
She nods once, as if he needs permission, a whimper escaping when he responds with his cock, not his venom-edged words. Starts fucking her hard, without hesitation, holding her down by the hip to keep her from sliding away with the force of his thrusts.
He's silent, neck tensed, except the occasional break of a puff of breath. Sweat drips off the tip of his nose onto her chest. His beard scratches just the slightest bit on the tender skin of her breast as he lowers down far enough to take one of her nipples in his mouth. Flat tongue teasing her at first, he has her body seizing up for a second when he draws on it, sharply, a little harsh with it.
Her head lolls when he unhands it to palm her other breast, the painfully stiff little peak passing beneath his thumb. She raises her hips to meet his, every muscular effort a strain when all her body wants to do is take.
He hits that spot inside that makes all sound stop right in the middle of her throat; hits that spot that makes everything clamp around him, needing more of that contact.
It's exactly what her body wants. It sucks him in and clings.
“Je-sus,” he murmurs. A kiss stamped down on her skin. “You’re so goddamn tight.”
“Bet every pussy’s tight, for you,” she says, high and warbling, wanting to be mean but really only making him huff in satisfaction, jerking up hard against her g-spot, making her cry out, then: “you and this stupid, fat dick.”
“Such a poet.”
She hasn’t been able to look at him directly, shifting glances from him back to the side wall of the tent. Hasn’t been able to look down at herself, either, except to try and watch his cock work in and out of her, but got so overwhelmed by the sight of what already felt so intensely good she had to avert her eyes. Feeling it is enough. The skins between them are nothing now, like the skin of the tent encapsulating them, useless at keeping anything of real danger out; just an idea, really more a flimsy show at separation from the encroaching other, and this level of intimacy is what she’s always been looking for. This type of absorption. She doesn’t need to see anything to experience it fully.
There’s another intensity, this one brand new, a sensation she’s never felt before.
Her arms are being licked by fire.
It feels like every atom of her is being shocked and shaken as hard as possible. It’s hot and sweet like the heat in her belly, racing through her nerves, filling her veins.
When she looks down at her arm, she can see the steady process of her veins hardening to twigs. She can feel it, but it's not painful, it's — freeing, almost, like the natural hardness was what her squishy fallible body was seeking. Like it sought him out specifically, in his fertile darkness, knowing he’d understand this supernatural process of hers, even if she doesn’t.
She watches it happen while he adjusts his hold on her, rising up on his knees, hands clapped on her hips, dragging her along his cock. A hint of green pushes through her skin, at the bend of her elbow and forearm. She’s actively evolving into something unknowable, thrilling in its body-intimate mystery.
“Darling —” he draws a hand up from her hip to tug at one of the tiny green leaves, and it’s like when he did the same to her nipple, the pleasure coming from how close to too much it rides. "It appears that you're blooming."
“Yeah,” is all she can say, broken and shaking. Especially when she meets his eyes, and the pale green’s been thrown away for darkness, his pupils blown so wide she can barely see the color in them at all, staring up at her from under his brows, fierce by design, by the build of his skull. He clutches her with them, their hold as gripping as his fingers. She’s so happy to see him enjoying the warmth and softness she’s kept safe for him that she doesn’t even question the absurdity of that particular line of thought.
He gives a gentle twist of one of the leaves, and her cunt clenches in response. She squeezes her eyes shut.
She’s intimidated again, here on this ledge, for the first time since she bit into the crabapple. Scared to show him her most vulnerable face, to hand over the nexus of her pleasure like she handed over everything else without so much as a second thought for what she was trading away, and what she was receiving in return.
“If you keep doing that, I’m gonna cum,” she gasps, when he flicks one of her leaves very delicately.
“Good,” he rasps, and doesn’t stop.
The sound of his skin hitting hers, his desperate turn from steady hard fucking to something animal, wild, and what she thought was an impending precipice turns into a straight drop-off.
Her orgasm seizes her, all at once.
A thunderclap — brightness — then excoriation.
He keeps fucking her even as she clenches hard through it. She clasps her hands around the back of his neck and kisses him fiercely, whimpering into his mouth. Her arms grow ever greener but her body’s burning white-orange, full of sparks, electricity funneled straight through where once she was delicate and alive and lively, but now is something wholly different. It's so strong she's surprised her fingertips aren't blackened by the force of it. Especially when he’s groaning out loud, spilling inside of her, Rose with her teeth clenched telling him “yeah, that’s mine, that’s mine,” feeling his cum gushing hot against her womb. She adores the ruined, ecstatic look on his face, and the noise he can’t help making; the stiffness of his muscles as he half-collapses onto her with his own rushing sense of power.
The secondary pleasure of making him cum sends her fluttering down on him with another cut-off, needy whimper that he greets with a smug noise of satisfaction. He stays hard enough to start rocking slowly again, a few long, lazy strokes that have her laughing, a little out of her mind with satisfaction.
The leaves retreat with painless but skin-crawling sensations as soon as she’s caught her breath and leveled her mind enough to snap back. She opens her eyes to find him propped above her on an elbow, playing with the last vestiges of her greenery as the leaves sink back into her skin.
“That’s — the leaves, that part is new. Never done that. Hope I don’t do it again, because, fuck, that was weird.”
His lips press together in a fond sort of smile. “It’s lovely. Not strange at all.”
“It’s something,” she exhales shakily, comforted beyond words that he’s so immediately accepting of a thing she can’t even begin to fathom yet. He eventually extracts himself from her, just enough to roll onto his side and take her back in his arms. His hold is loose, hands roaming across her skin in possessive exploration.
In tucking herself up against him she notices a gold flash on her ankle. She bends her leg up to find she’s wearing a thin gold anklet, its chain welded around without a clasp so she can’t take it off.
“Is that you?” She asks with a lilt of incredulity. He nods, head resting atop hers. “God, I want to trade sex powers, then. You can grow the leaves.”
“No, thank you. I’m more than happy to bejewel you as you deserve,” he purrs, tightening his hold as she curls up closer to his chest.
She makes a half hearted, sarcastic hmph, but it’s hard to stay play-angry when his heart is thumping madly for her against her cheek.
“I was never a huge fan of jewelry, but maybe it was more like… nobody thought to give me any, I guess. I work with my hands so much, and I lose everything.”
“Not my gifts, you won’t.”
“Hah. Cute. I guess we’ll have to see.”
He has no idea how easily things disappear out of her life. Ephemerality and Rose have always gone hand in hand.
His eventual drawl is cold honey slow. “And what was the illustrious career that kept these little hands so busy, hm?”
Was. It settles in the air between them.
So does the admission of her career, the blunt reminder of her former self — the one who’d joyfully dedicated her entire life to something which ended up causing her the worst possible pain. Who did everything right, until one day she didn’t, and was made to pay handsomely for the mistake.
“I was an aircraft mechanic.”
Her tone says no further questions, and thankfully, he gets it.
She wants to ask, and you? But something stops her, saying that’s a futile line of inquiry.
“You lost your family, and then you simply — what, quit your job, and decided to come out here?”
“Basically.”
He’s stroking her arm slowly, rhythmically, and his body is warm, and it feels right. Rose’s eyes can hardly stay open any longer.
“And has it helped? Are you better now?”
She snorts. “I haven’t decided yet.”
(The space in her chest, once carved out by sorrow but filling now with giddiness, says that’s not true at all.)
/
It’s the flowers tickling her face that first wake Rose, not the rising sun.
She opens her eyes to see Hux still asleep, and absolutely covered in climbing, flowering vines.
Their legs are tangled together still, his arm heavy atop her hips, his cock a stiff ridge against her hip. Hux looks almost fragile in sleep, off-puttingly tender in his perfect stillness. The green vines constricting him, with their dazzling array of blooms, make an eerily lovely sight with his pale skin and auburn hair.
They trail around his neck, the knob of his naked, freckled shoulder. Adorn the hollow of his throat, emerge from behind his back to drape over his ribs. A rainbow of floral color dresses him, restraints blooming all over his helpless body.
Rose squints in disbelief, sniffing and yawning, the tip of her nose ice-cold, nipples stiff in the wet chill of the early morning.
The leaves on the vines are pretty, but the flowers — those are immediately off-putting.
What looks to be several different varieties of the same species crowd on one vine: alien looking purple blooms with fringed yellow stamen, bell-shaped burgundies, palm-sized blue creations with fountaining periwinkle centers. Absolutely impossible in nature. Further sickening proof of something she’s clearly done without even remotely understanding how.
She flicks her gaze back up and can’t help smiling when she takes him in, despite the weight of unease in her gut. It’s gratifying, seeing him entrapped by her own power. Even if it was while unconscious.
When she moves to brush his cheekbone, Rose discovers that she, too, is climbing with the vines. They’re twisting around her legs, crawling between her thighs. They’re lush at her feet, winding around her toes, up the cleft of her ass, around her back and her shoulders. Connecting her to him in a pretty, living cage.
She breathes in slowly, trying not to think too hard about what’s happening. Wanting only to enjoy her first morning with him, as far as she can.
The vines are easy enough to shake off. It’s another matter entirely to come out from under the arm he’s slung over her, and only partially because it’s heavy and she doesn’t want to wake him. He infuses her with this sense that nothing is wrong, as long as she’s tangled up in him, and unzipping the tent flap promises stomach-dropping discoveries that she's not ready to make, yet.
Rose lays there a while longer, soaking up his body heat and the comfort of being held, but she has to pee and she’s freezing. Gingerly, she moves his arm, and apparently he’s a deep sleeper because all he does is groan a little, brows furrowed, a cute imitation of his waking scowl. One of the blood red flowers brushes his face and he pushes it off with a clumsy, unconscious movement, then falls back asleep with a stuttering snore.
Rose sits up, regretting the need to, and emerges from the trapped air they’ve been sharing with the familiar squeal of the tent zipper. She ducks out, noting that her knees don’t offer any protest — they must’ve stitched back together overnight. Yet another drop in the what the fuck bucket.
Before she’d shimmed out, Rose had assumed the sun had simply yet to rise, but that can’t be it.
The sky and the light have the purplish, hazy quality of late twilight, not pre-dawn — a watercolor gradient of blue and violet and indigo. Vibrant darkness. No stars. She looks up, expecting to see the moon about to set, but instead of her dimpled surface there’s a lilac-tinged white disk hanging in the sky. It diffuses a milky glow from its noontime position.
Her phone, retrieved from her backpack, reads 12:04 PM.
It has zero signal and very little battery, which is just as well. She slips it back in the pocket, grabs toilet paper and a pair of panties, along with the sweatshirt she shucks on immediately.
It can’t be mid-day yet. It’s cold, like the morning. And it smells like the morning, lingering smoke and all the exhalations of the trees and plants, condensed into a dew that coats the grass and her backpack and Rose’s legs, as she stumbles a few paces away.
Maybe her phone has the time wrong; is as randomly and catastrophically fucked as her InReach GPS. Anything is possible.
She squats to pee and takes in the scenery. From what she can see in the dark, the campsite is the same as when they went to sleep.
Except now, it’s absolutely blanketed in growth.
She’s done more than wrap Hux in clematis vines. There’s a veritable grove of thick wildflowers all around the campsite, bushes of yellow daisies and orange thrusts of poppy and foxgloves standing tall. Apparently, she’s as powerful and prolific as her companion, who added another gold anklet to her leg while she was sleeping.
She cleans herself and pulls her underwear back on. Standing, looking around at the impossible grove around her, Rose knows she ought to start a campfire. Or, better yet, she ought to dress as quickly as possible, and get the hell out of dodge while Hux is still asleep.
She does none of these things. Wants to do none of these things.
Most of all, she’s tired. Bone-deep, depleted; like she’s done weeks of hard labor and just now has been allowed to rest. Her body twinges with the exhaustion of her long, difficult journey.
Finally, she has absolutely zero urge to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Forward isn’t a direction that really interests her anymore. There’s no place for her but here, where there’s a bed and warm arms and perfect understanding waiting for her, all cradled in the pretty, living art of her soul.
She’s going to crawl back inside the tent to go back to sleep with him, bringing his imprisoning arm back around her hips. He’ll wake up slowly and sweetly and she’ll ride him until his eyes are bright and malicious again. The thought makes her feel so good, so light and buoyant, it’s almost unbearable.
The distant birdsong echoes. Merry daytime chirping, here in the dead of an eternal night.
She exhales, and it feels exactly like freedom.
/