Welcome to Gaia! ::

The simple, echoing of a drop of water is the first sound to meet his ears, the sound high and flat, like the drop had landed on concrete. Slowly he became aware of the cold, hard floor beneath him; wooden boards, the last polishing they had seen years before and the rough, splintery texture bit painfully into the bare flesh of his arms and legs as he moved. He was lying on his back, limbs spread out and head tilted to the right with his cheek pressed against the floor. Faintly, he could hear someone cough from somewhere below him, the sound followed by another drop of water, presumably landing in the same spot as the first had. As his fingertips brushed over the floorboards, lightly enough so no slivers of wood embedded themselves in his tender skin, he straightened his head and tried to open his eyes but found the lids uncooperative. A small bolt of unfounded fear passed through him at this, the tensing of the muscles in his body causing a deep ache to tremble to life, and he applied more force to lifting his lids. This time they came apart, though still with slight reluctance; the lids were nearly glued shut with a thick, yellowish substance that had leaked from his eyes while he slumbered.

Bright, glaring sunlight streamed in through a horizontal rectangle in the naked window on the wall above his head, the rest of the window boarded up. The patch of light fell across his narrow chest and pallid face, and he let out a soft cry of surprise as the light hit his sensitive eyes. He lifted his thin, pale arms - littered with sickly-looking, grey-green patches - to his face and lightly rubbed his lids with the meaty parts of his palms; the half-crusted goop surrounding his eyes mostly being brushed away. He struggled into a sitting position, finding this task surprisingly difficult, and opened his eyes again, blinking furiously. For a few moments nothing came into focus, the world around him was a mass of dark colors that bled into one another and created no definitive shapes, then slowly things became clearer. A bed lay in one corner, the iron posts spotted with rust and the mattress, once a blinding white, was now a faded ivory. A chest of drawers in another corner, the once glossy surface now faded and split with age, just as the wooden floor beneath him was. There was a light fixture hanging from the roof, nearly dead center over his head, the dark bulb bare and hanging from a slightly frayed cord with a pull chain dangling below it.

His throat hurt.

He winced as he tried to swallow, his mouth dry and his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth, and he absently wiped the back of his hand against his lips. As he drew his hand away, he lowered his gaze to find it was streaked with a small amount of blood; his lips dry and cracked to the point where they oozed blood. He realized there was something in his mouth, between his cheek and his gums on the left side, and pushed it forward with the tip of his swollen tongue, pressing it out through his lips and letting it fall onto the floor between his thighs. A small, pearly white molar winked at him from the dirty floor, and he stuck his tongue into the hole where it had so recently vacated itself. The hole was seeping a thick fluid of some kind, though it wasn't blood, it was tangy and made his tongue feel a little tingly.

He started abruptly, his tongue shying away from the gap between his remaining teeth as there was another cough, this one closer, sounding almost like the person who had voiced it was in the same room with him. He glanced around, dark eyes wide, but saw no one. The cough resounded again and this time he was able to pinpoint the approximate location, which was out the door and perhaps across the hall. His arms and legs felt heavy, and for a moment he wasn't sure if he would be able to stand, but after a moment of trembling and straining, he was able to haul himself to his feet. He stood, swaying and almost losing his balance once, but he stayed on his feet. Turning his attention back to the door, he noted that the top hinge was broken; the door was swung inwards and leaning precariously on the lower hinge. He swallowed again, or tried to, and again he winced,
(it hurts so bad...)
his body leaning forward slightly but his feet refusing the command to move. They were bare, he didn't want to shuffle them across this horrid floor, but lifting them seemed impossible at the moment.

Mama... where are you?


A loud, swift inhale marked the end of the dream and Ophiuchus bolted upright in his bed, wings flaring out to his sides for a moment and his exotic eyes opening wide. His hood flexed around his head and neck, mouth opening in a small, silent 'O'. After a brief moment frozen like that, as if he were a model posing for a photographer, his mouth clamped shut and his face changed from fear to confusion, to worry then back to confusion before settling on something between uneasy and nauseas. The changes his scaled face made, all in the span of no more than twenty seconds, would have been comical had anyone been in the small room to witness it. But no one was, he was alone, sitting in a bed that was perfectly clean and sheets that were perfectly white and without one single hole were entangled about his legs. It was dark, but not completely; pale streaks of light from the moon shown in through the window off to his right, the navy curtains drawn aside to reveal an even darker sky littered with stars. His wings slowly relaxed, a long feather dislodging itself from the rest and seesawing back and forth through the air until it landed silently on the floor. He noticed his hands were sitting in his lap, shaking, and he clenched them into tight fists for a moment, something flitting across his facial features in the darkness before he opened them and then laced his fingers together. A dream, just a dream, it's okay, it was just a dream.

But, no, it wasn't just a dream, was it? Deep down he knew better, just as he had with the previous
(nightmares)
dreams he had had. He glanced away from his hands, his black, gold-ringed eyes falling onto the clock that sat on the small (and completely perfect) nightstand to one side of the headboard of his bed. It read 3:22AM. A sigh welled up in his chest and traveled to his throat before he was able to quell it, knowing it was too early to actually get up. Still, he didn't want to just lie here and think about what his subconscious had just made him go through, or for that matter, any of the other dreams. But he knew he would, somehow, he knew...


His footsteps were light on the worn, cracking boards of the staircase, but that didn't stop the long, piercing creaks from ripping through the near silence. They sounded hideously animalistic to his young ears, perhaps like a mouse that was having its tail slowly rolled over with a rolling pin. He immediately banished that thought from his mind and concentrated on the staircase, finding it a little difficult to maneuver the steps with his weak legs. He did reach the bottom though, and without incident, but once there he suddenly wished he could whirl around and bound back up to the room he had come from. The smell that was down here assaulted him and he gagged, hands clapping against his bleeding lips and mottled nose to try and keep the disgusting scent from invading his nostrils.

It smelled like death...


No. He had to stop. He clamped his hands to the sides of his head, his palms flattening across the small holes that served as his ears, and he squeezed his eyes shut for a moment; demanding that the images leave. His breath hitched in his chest and he felt his eyes begin to water, the first traces of tears stinging as they always seemed to do. He opened his eyes and took a number of deep breaths, letting them out through his mouth in long, soft sighs. He lowered his hands after a moment and ran his fingertips over his cream colored lips, drawing back and looking down at them... no blood, as he had known there wouldn't be any. He slowly unwound his legs from the blankets and swung them over the edge of the bed, sitting for a moment with his elbows against his thighs and his head in his hands; eyes staring blankly down at the floor.


"Mama?" He called out hesitantly, are you here? But the rest of the words didn't follow the first, what little he had found of his hoarse voice had melted away to nothing, and he was left mute. The first floor of the building was exceedingly dark thanks to numerous boards that had been nailed over the windows from the outside, just as the one in his room had been. He couldn't see anyone else in the small corridor he was in when his eyes finally adjusted to the gloom, but he knew other people were here. Oh yes, he knew, he could smell their decay just as he could smell his own rising from his ruined body. He moved down the hall, no longer aware that his feet were shuffling and catching dozens of splinters in their soft beds, and swayed from side to side almost like a drunkard. His arms outstretched in front of him and off to the sides a little to try and keep from running into something. He knew Mama was still in this building somewhere, he knew because after the outbreak, thousands of people had been locked in similar buildings like this, signs posted
(QUARANTINED)
on the outside to keep people away until they determined who had it and who didn't. The people that didn't, they were taken somewhere else, and the people that did? It was only a matter of time before the new plague took them. Was that right? He thought so, but his mind was feeling funny, sluggish. It was hard to concentrate on his current thought, hard to bring up pictures and things like that. He thought the new plague had another name than just that, but he couldn't remember it at the moment.

Oh God, he's just a child. Mama had said, And yet it didn't even spare my little baby boy. No time to think about that now, he had to find her. He wanted her to hold him, he was feeling hot, as if he had a high fever, and his arms and legs were hurting. There was an odd burning sensation in the back of his throat, and his skin itched, but he didn't dare try and scratch it, not with the way he was weaving to and fro and his vision kept darkening and blurring; he was liable to fall on his butt and never get up. He pressed on for her, for Mama, she would know what to do. She would be able to cure him, he knew she would. She would take him in her arms and hold him and kiss him and tell him everything was going to be okay, and it would be okay, just as soon as he found her.

Finally, ten feet and no fewer than two minutes later he reached the room at the end of the hallway, his cold palms bumping into the wood of a half-closed door. He stopped, swayed for a moment, his eyelids heavy and half-drooping over his cloudy, bloodshot eyes and he finally lowered his arms. He swallowed, face screwing up at the burning pain, and tried to talk, but it felt like his mouth was full of cotton and all he could get out was a hoarse, "Nnn."

After a moment of standing in the hallway, tilting back and forth as if he were dancing to some melody that only he heard, his pale, deathly thin arms that were stricken with bits of rotting flesh lifted, and he laid his palms against the half-closed door once again; applying what little strength he had into the simple task of pushing it open, somehow sure that Mama would be on the other side, waiting for him, waiting to make the pain go away and make everything better...


Ophiuchus shot to his feet, his heart thudding wildly and his breath caught in his throat. The scales on his face that created a two-tone effect caught the silvery shafts of moonlight that danced in through the window and they glimmered, almost seeming to be wet. The gold ring in each of his black eyes came to life, dancing wildly as he shook his head. No, that was it! No more! No more! He stumbled towards the door (both hinges intact and the wood painted a pale sky blue) and stepped out into the hallway, head swiveling from side to side as he looked around. For a moment he was unsure as to where he was, but slowly reality came back to him and he turned to the right, regaining his balance and quietly tiptoeing up to a door further down and across from his. He paused just outside the door, his eyes peering into the room beyond it, through the small space between the doorframe and the door itself. It was dark, darker than the hallway, and definitely darker than his room had been.

Swallowing, extremely thankful no unpleasant burning accompanied this act, he raised one hand and curled it into a fist, rapping lightly on the door. His knock was so soft that even he barely heard it, but he knew the being inside would hear it loud and clear, if she were awake or simply dozing; he wasn't sure if she would be able to hear it and rouse herself were she deep asleep. He perked slightly as a soft rustle could be heard from within the room - someone shifting under blankets - and then a soft sigh resounded. A muffled 'come on in' could be heard and he gently pushed the door open.


The room was brighter than the hallway he was standing in as the door swung inwards on screaming hinges. There were four windows, and though two were still boarded up, the other two had been stripped clean and sunlight cast its harsh glow in almost every corner of the small room, leaving no detail to the imagination. Mama was not beyond the door, waiting for him to come to her as he had so fully believed, in the way that only a child was capable of believing. Instead, lying across the floor in what started out as neat rows were the bodies of those that had fallen to the incurable plague. The corpses were hidden under thin, ivory-colored sheets, but the fabric that lay against the wasted bodies had turned a sickly yellow color, mottled with brown patches.
As his eyes, wide with horror and revulsion, followed the neatly placed bodies they slowly became more erratic, as if whoever placed them here no longer cared about being kind to the dead and had just tossed them in. The sheets remained covering them though, at least he was graced with that much, though each one held a discolored pose to kindly let him know just how the corpses had been
(dropped)
laid to rest. He noticed, his terror mounting higher and higher as his eyes drank everything in, that some of them were even overlapping; lying atop one another like a child's building blocks. He was suddenly filled with the insane notion that they would all sit up at the exact same time and start crawling towards him, perhaps uttering some guttural language that only they understood. He became woozy, swaying back and forth in the doorway and he realized that he had been holding his breath since opening the door. Letting it out in a loud burst, he then inhaled and choked halfway through from the smell that assailed him. His eyes watered and glinting tears gathered at the corners, being held in by the constantly renewing ooze for a moment before finally over spilling and falling down his hollow, blotchy cheeks. He raised his hands to his nose and covered it as he had done earlier, finally reeling enough to loose balance and topple onto his backside. Tears streamed down his face as he gazed up at the ceiling, hands covering the lower half of his face. Everything was too dark and blurry from his tears for him to make out any details on the cracked ceiling, but he didn't need to. It was going to happen to him, oh it was it was it was. The same thing that happened to all those people in that room, it was happening to him right now!

A soft, whispering moan came from him as he lay on the floor of the hallway, feet still near the door that led to so many bodies, people that had fallen to it; and he was going to be one of them. Tossed in there carelessly like those he had seen, they wouldn't even care enough to lay him neatly down, arms folded across his stomach and eyes closed. They would just pick him up by his legs no doubt and drag him in, rolling him on top of the others, he would be lucky if they even covered him with a sheet. Or maybe they would just leave him right where he was
(Mama, oh Mama where are you? It hurts so bad I need you to hold me)
to sit and rot. He suddenly realized he could taste something in the back of his throat, an almost spicy, metallic taste; blood. He hadn't bitten anything, the blood was coming from his throat (or perhaps worse, his lungs); dry and raw, the whimpering moaning he was emitting had perhaps irritated it enough to cause it to bleed. He wanted Mama, but she wasn't here, he should get up and look for her again, but oh he was tired and his body ached! A nap was all he needed, just a short one right here, after that he would feel better. He would wake up and continue to look for her, find her in one of the other rooms and then everything would be fine. Everything... would be fine.

Everything... fine...


"Ophi? Hey, Ophi, come back to me."

His reptilian eyes suddenly focused on the tanned, beautiful face of Rhiannon as she snapped her fingers in front of his large, confused eyes, at first not understanding what was going on. His body, much smaller than hers, trembled as he continued to stare at her with his two-tone gaze, his wings limp and drooping behind him. She frowned and brought her hand up to his forehead, slender fingers brushing against the smooth scales there before resting against his shoulder. "Are you alright?"

"I... had a dream." He stated softly, his voice flat and his eyes still wide, though the confusion had left them for the moment. His wings ruffled slightly behind him as they picked themselves up and folded in against his back, and the taller woman frowned again.

She straightened up and gently guided the boy into her room with the hand that was on his shoulder, not bothering to close the door over as they headed towards her bed. His movements were a little stiff and his face still held that distant look of panic, but he seemed to be taking it better than he had the first couple times this had happened. She turned him away from the bed and gave his shoulder a firm nudge downwards, causing him to sit on the edge. She then knelt in front of him, slit eyes turning up to his face as he lowered his head.

"Are you okay, Ophi?" Her voice, normally heavy with sarcasm and disinterest, was for once genuinely concerned. This was her boy, after all, she hated to see him in such distress. "You need something to drink?"

"N-no," He stated after a moment, lifting his gold-ringed gaze to hers. He suddenly felt exceedingly small, which in fact he was small for his age, but that wasn't the only thing. He did feel small, but he also felt frightened, confused, but most of all he felt alone. He knew that Rhia wasn't big on comforting, but would she really deny him if he needed it? And at that moment he really, really needed it. He lowered his gaze to his lap again and spoke in a voice that wasn't even a whisper, "Will you... will you hold me? Please?"

At first she didn't move, save for her tail which endlessly flicked behind her; she simply continued to look at him with troubled eyes. Then her face softened and she slowly stood, turning around and sitting on the bed next to him. Wrapping one of her arms around his slender shoulders, she noted (as she always did) how his scales were smooth and cool to the touch, and the boy let out his breath in a shaky sigh. His body leaned against hers and she had to hunch forward a little for his head to be able to rest against her shoulder, but at the moment she didn't mind; she just wanted to let him know that it was okay. She lifted her hand and placed it against his head, gently stroking near his ear hole as her other arm hugged him lightly.

He slipped his own arms around her waist, returning the hug, and closed his eyes, inhaling deeply as the corners of his pale lips twitched in a smile. She smelled of jasmine and vanilla, the mixture of the two scents beautiful and comforting to him, and he absently nuzzled her shoulder. The smell reminded him of someone, he didn't know who, but he didn't care just then either; all he cared about was how it made him feel safe and wanted. Within moments he was already dozing, no dreams of death haunting him as he slumbered peacefully in the winged demoness' arms.