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[hr][CENTER][img]https://i.imgur.com/jO99YWI.jpg[/img][/CENTER][indent][sub][COLOR=SILVER][B]Location:[/B][/COLOR] [I]Formal Homecoming[/I] - [I]A.R.C., Pacific Royal Campus[/I][/sub][sup][right][COLOR=SILVER][b]Dance Monkey #4.092:[/b][/COLOR] [I]See No Evil[/I][/right][/sup][/indent][sub][hr][/sub][INDENT][sub][color=SILVER][B]Interaction(s):[/B][/COLOR] [I][color=94b9ff]Cleo Boyd[/color] [/I][/sub][sub][@spicykvnt][/sub][SUP][RIGHT][COLOR=SILVER][b]Previously:[/b][/COLOR] [I]Hawkward Memory[/I][/right][/SUP]
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Hail? It started light, the way storms so often did, broken propellers and frozen drones eerily reminiscent of the little balls of ice bouncing, sharp and hard, off his skin when he looked up, frowning at a ceiling he couldn’t actually see. Hail was a rarer memory here than it had been back home, and not something you’d expect on a clear night without much wind. 

But Lucas wasn’t the only one looking up when something heavier hit the roof. Wasn’t the only one dropping things and covering their ears when hail became thunder vibrating his bones. Wasn’t the only one struggling to breathe as that something forced its way inside, shoulders rounding into a hunched back bending under the weight tearing him wide into shapes he wasn’t meant to hold. Falling fast fragments of thought never finished with the roof pierced, punctured, and torn rending him out of every when into counting the seconds behind each impact of now [i]now [b]now[/b][/i]. He staggered into a table and clung to its four-legged stability when the screams started before finding his breath and scrambling underneath it, pressing his face into his knees, curling up against the threat of scattering into pieces across the floor. 

His ears were ringing. His head echoed, but fingers played across his back and smoothed fabric across flat wood. Plates slid between friends and glasses played Russian roulette between hands putting them down, picking them up, and coming back empty to lay warm weight into his shoulder as someone leaned in to look at the feathers. 

He tried to stay there, holding his breath, terrified of everything just beyond the periphery where cloth curled over the edge obscuring a view he didn’t want to see, but someone jostled the table. Shaking that fragile security out of place in the moment and dropping him back to fast breaths and fear and he couldn’t look, couldn’t move, didn’t want to hear it, but broken glass sprayed light and dark reflections across the back of his eyelids, painting a hole in the sky and the shape that filled it, wings so wide they blocked the light. 

It was inside. 

There was no muffled quiet beyond his ears. Only shouts. Cracks. Cut-off screams. More thunder rolling through him. The floor shook as he slowly pulled his hands free from squishing his head back together, lowering them past his knees and down, hesitating, bracing before he set them, flat, fingers spread and fell past the dust and hair and seeping chill pressing into his palms, sinking into a thousand streams of instrumental chaos, chords and cacophony, strings and songs and sliding start and stop perfection dragging him deeper beneath the shouts and calls and shrieks and voices in sync in rambling in rivalry in play in panic in the solid shuddering support of bodies in action and inaction settling him between the cracks of every parcelled inch spread out under this disaster. And slowly, determinedly, he waded back up, through the slip and slide flatline rush of everything rearranged to perfection, flat floor raised one step, two step, three, then more, through the parade of industry setting down each weight four by four by four of chairs and tables on even ground and bursts of volume raised or lowered and splashes of light. The slow murmur of preparation building into the excited crescendo of lights on, music blasting, and feet on the floor until everything froze, a glass dropped, the illusion shattered. 

He followed the outward ripple of surging, tumbling feet to a line of cold so deep it had to be ice. Found the weight of words as heavy as the one uttering them into a sudden still quiet that flickered in and out of reach with each explosive attempt to deny the demands. Lucas couldn’t see what was happening, but he felt it in every tense shift of steps forward or back, the low murmurs and the claws dragging across his skin, the movement of the crowd, the crumpling of warm bodies pooling blood over his fingers, the short shrieks and broken sobs and the knees digging into his spine. There were voices he knew and some he didn’t, words and names and sudden cracks in his head that made his breath hitch in and fall out on a whimper, but he didn’t stop chasing the next second as well as he could. 

He knew these sensations. People were fighting. 
People were dying. He knew those, too. 

He couldn’t look. Didn’t want to watch, but he needed to know. Needed to listen through the disaster if he couldn’t do anything else. Until he found one pair of hands that didn’t whisk away as he reached for them, pressed flat on the edge of a scream where poison-bright worms of light writhed into the empty spaces of his mind, devouring the echoes of that long wail and his thoughts with them before he pulled back. The hands alone he might not have recognised, but the power, he did. A sparkling mist of light and feeling narrowed into focus. He’d felt that before. And he hummed as he finally found something he could do. His hands could not reach hers; he couldn’t pull her down to join him safe beneath the floor, but she was trying to do something, trying to reach something, and [i]that[/i] Lucas could help with. So, he did. With an odd, incongruent glee that wrapped around her. Found.

He sank into older memories of quiet where it was easier to move. Where it was easier to focus. To reach inside and out. Where nothing pushed back when they moved forward until they were in the eye of the storm surrounding the figure she wanted to reach. He felt her grasp solidify as his own frayed under that renewed barrage of erasure, lights prickling in the back of his mind, broken screams still ringing in his ears as red and silver flashed behind his eyelids. It felt like forever before he pushed through and past and time moved on as the storm lifted and so did she, her feet whisked away with the same rush of wind that dragged at the giant and Lucas winced more at the claws gouging long furrows through him than he did at the final roar of a beast denied. 

He waited then, holding his breath in the sudden quiet as the wind vanished, as the screaming faded, as cool air slowly wafted into the empty space, seeking the warmth of those hands, feeling the bodies pressed together, listening to the gasps and choked sobs and broken exclamations hoping to hear the voice that was missing. His fingers curling hard against the floor until he found them, small against the whole, still where he’d felt them last, and Manny’s voice, too. 

[color=a86f32]“Lucas, yeah, okay. I’m here.”[/color] He breathed the words… Rocking into his relief, one hand and then the other lifting to muffle the world again. He was safe. She was safe. They were safe, right? It was finished? The screaming wouldn’t stop.


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