barracuda

[veira]

World: MSPA; Homestuck; dinosaur AU
Characters: Nepeta, Equius, Jade
Wordcount: 2661
Summary: Nepeta, Jade, and Equius are the last of a broken Troodon pack that's trying to survive the end of the world.
Note: hs_olympics round three: time warp. Originally posted here.

Prehistoric Wasteland

[Troodon is a small, bird-like dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous period. It is believed to have been nocturnal and carnivorous.]

It's cold. The wind blows in hard from the east and it never stops smelling wrong. It smells of ice and coal and ash; it smells like the world is burning, and overhead all Nepeta can see for miles is a sky choked black with ash and chemicals. It's been this way for weeks. Ever since a spear of fire sliced down from the heavens and crashed in the distance. Everything shook. The earth itself quaked and rumbled and half the forest was flattened, and the cloud of burning dust and dirt that followed settled on everything like a pestilence.

Her pack had been killed by the falling trees and burning rock rain. That or they had died once the cloud had blanketed the area and the poison and infection had set in. A healthy pack of twelve; a mob of dangerous, lithe predators who had ruled everything, taking what meat they wished and choosing to spare what would one day grow and mature to something better. They had dominated the plains and the underbrush, running where they pleased and sleeping every hot day happily under the clear sky. Now the air is cold and dead and everything tastes of poison. Now it's just Nepeta and her brother. They've been forced to leave their home, forced to keep moving as each mile they cross is the same toxic desert: the forest choked with cold ash and fallen trees, animals dead everywhere and each carcass tainted with the same poison that's thick in the ash that falls from the sky like snow. It's been two weeks of running and eating bad meat, sleeping in bad places, and as more time ticks by, Nepeta fears more and more that things will never go back to what they used to be.

She breathes in short puffs of air, white condensing in front of her nose with each soft exhalation. Her feet itch with the toxic ash that clings to her scales. Trees lie crossways and broken along the ground. She jumps from one to the other, inching closer to what looks like it used to be grasslands. There's a lump of something that's stretched out like a dead thing on the ground out there—but it's not dead. Nepeta's nose is precise and powerful, and she knows this creature is alive. Ash still filters down slowly from the clouds above, covering everything for miles in a carpet of soft grey that burns, clinging to her feathers and limbs and mixing acidic with the condensation at her nose.

She and Equius had split to scout the area, he going east and Nepeta going west. To see if maybe they could find somewhere to live here. If maybe somewhere there was a break to the toxic ash and the devastation. Nepeta had been hopeful, but now she feels disappointment pooling sickly in her stomach. This is a bad place. This place is not safe and won't be safe for a long time. They have to keep moving, and she has no idea where they will go.

It had been more of the same until she'd spotted that lump out in the plains. Until she'd breathed full and hard and had tasted a familiar scent on the wind. Someone is alive out there. Someone who smells familiar. It's not one of her pack, she knows, because she would know that scent anywhere. But it's her species. It's one of her own kind, and maybe that person will be able to point her and Equius in the right direction. If nothing else, a pack of three is more likely to bring down game than a pack of two.

She creeps forward, leaving the downed stand of trees and tracking three-toed footprints through the burning ash. The stranger has fallen near a picked-clean carcass of a saurolophus, ash filtering through the exposed ribs and the lump next to it nearly covered in dust as well. Nepeta stops at what smells like a nose and peers at it before chuffing out a cautious greeting.

Nothing happens. For a moment Nepeta thinks that perhaps she's mistaken. Perhaps the acid is getting into her nose and making her smell everything strange, and that is terrifying. She needs that to survive, to help Equius survive, and losing that is a step into death.

But then the ash shifts, running in sticky rivulets off the stranger's body as it lifts its head.

It—no, she—is the same species as Nepeta is. She catches her scent, sees the crests of her eyes and the slope of her fanged snout, and Nepeta knows. Her colors are strange though, bright as new spring leaves and shimmering like the aurora.

The female blinks, shakes her head, looks up at Nepeta. She looks as awful as Nepeta does. Her feathers are burned and some of them dissolving along the edges; her neck is thin, lacking in the fat of a well fed animal.

She doesn't stand straight away as she would if meeting a stranger in the wild. Instead she sits there, breathing shallow with condensation dotting her nose. But her eyes are bright beautiful green and clear, piercing almost, and Nepeta knows this is no dying individual. She has been through the fire and the rain of toxic ash just as Nepeta has, and she is bold enough to sit down here to rest, here in the middle of acid and the open threat of danger.

She chirps a greeting back to Nepeta, clear and careful. And then she presses her foreclaws into the dust, getting slowly to her feet, and submits in a quiet request to join the pack.

Jade. Her name is Jade, and she strides next to Nepeta a clear head taller than Nepeta is. She seems healthy despite the charred feathers and the ash clinging in clumps to her back and tail. She's thin, but strong. Tall and lean compared to Nepeta's small and compact stature. A distance sprinter instead of a rushing scout, and that's good. That's something they need, because as strong as Equius is, he has always lacked in endurance even before every breath he took tasted of acid.

Jade had come from the north. Nepeta had been thinking of traveling to the north, but Jade tells her quiet tales of the choking dust storms that tasted of nothing but sour death. She tells her of nights so cold that healthy pack members had died in their sleep. She tells of hunger and hunger and more hunger, and to think that these lands are as plentiful in food as Jade says they are fills Nepeta with dread.

They are all going to die out here.

Equius rumbles deep in his throat when he sees Jade. His eyes stay locked on her, every single royal blue feather puffed out in a threat display. He circles once, hackles raised, and Jade circles in the opposite direction; her instincts fighting against instincts as she wars internally over listening to her new alpha and fleeing for her life. She chooses to keep Nepeta between herself and this huge angry male, and to trust.

He sees the newcomer as a threat and he's always been violently protective of Nepeta. He's wound tight as a spring because they watched the world end and watched their pack die; they've lost everything and he refuses to lose his sister as well. Hopelessness is eating at them both, and Nepeta knows that the instant either of them loses the other, insanity will claim the survivor like a band of rabid mammals.

That's not happening now. She refuses.

Nepeta watches him, Jade hovering at her back as they both turn to keep Equius in their line of sight. He's her brother and she loves him, but in this instance he is completely wrong.

She lets out a piercing eagle's shriek. The silence shatters like broken ice and the reprimand goes through Equius like a kick from a hadrosaur. A troodon pack is led by a female, and Nepeta is in charge. She is the new alpha. She is the leader. And even if Equius has been the larger of the two, stepping forward first and protecting Nepeta since they were chicks, this time he needs to fall into place behind her. Submit to her choice to add to the pack. And he had better like it.

He goes quiet. The feathers along his spine still stand on end, alarmed, but he falls silent. He stands up straight and lets the threat fall from his posture, and Nepeta and Equius regard each other with a good six long strides between them.

A crossing place. What do they do here? Do they just go on forever with just the two of them; struggling every minute to survive and curling up hungry and cold every morning? This is a good choice. Folding someone new into their pack is a good choice. And as much as she looks up to her big brother, Nepeta needs him to trust her now.

He lowers his head and steps forward. Jade shuffles her feet but she doesn't run, and when Equius approaches the two females, he sets his nose against the side of Jade's and looks into her eyes: a sign of acceptance and submission.

Nepeta clucks happily and turns to lead her tiny pack to the south.

They work well together. The larger animals had been impossible to take down for just Equius and Nepeta. They'd needed to stick to smaller prey that was often as tainted by the toxic ash as the air was. Even the flesh had tasted sour. With Jade added to the pack, the three of them take down a lone protoceratops and gorge themselves on meat that finally doesn't taste like volcanic chemicals. The meat goes down well and Nepeta feels her stomach settle for the first time since the meteor fell and the sky crusted over.

Jade isn't nearly as quiet as she had been those first few days. She chatters constantly now, telling stories of her old pack and her old life. Sometimes the stories sound crazy, like the giant white mammal she says she'd lived with for years and had treated like a packmate and a friend. Jade is strange, but Nepeta isn't sure she's strange enough to believe that tale.

Equius grunts stories back. Mostly stories about how he was STRONG and how he was valiant and how he did well to take down prey and stay in the pecking order of the old pack. Order is important to Equius. Sometimes he forgets that he falls below Nepeta on that order, but she needs to do nothing more than thump him with her tail to keep him in line.

But what surprises her the most is how well he gets on with Jade. He doesn't simply grudgingly put up with her. When Nepeta sneaks away to scout the area, she comes back the two of them standing side by side, blue and green, and Equius brushes ash from Jade's neck with a gentle sweep of his nose. Jade shuffles closer and chirps happily, and for a while Nepeta lurks upwind and watches them dote on each other.

Perhaps her brother isn't as callous as she'd always thought he was.

The weather picks up even though the sky stays opaque and the wind is choking with dust. Sleet adds to the mix, half-frozen water that drips from her feathers and turns her toes numb. Nepeta feels the ache inside, the loss of her pack hurting and the constant fear nagging at her that she will never find a way to lead them out of this. They will die out here in the pouring, icy rain. She's scared. She truly is, and it only eats at her more as time goes on. Equius and Jade are counting on her, but the farther south they go the more everything is the same—death everywhere, plants and carcasses all crusted dry and volcanic dust caked into every crack and crevice.

At her right, Jade stands tall, her green eyes peering into the distance. She steps into the wind and puts her slight frame between the cutting sleet and Nepeta. There's something comforting in her gaze as Nepeta looks up to her, and Jade lowers her head and nuzzles against her jaw.

Relax. Relax and stop putting so much pressure on yourself. Everything will be okay.

Nepeta nuzzles back, so glad to have someone warm and perceptive at her side.

They sleep in a tiny cave at daybreak, the three of them pressing close in a heap to conserve warmth. It's cold. It's so cold now that the world has ended, now that what falls from the sky is only acid rain and tangy snow and ash ash ash. There's no more hot summer showers and no more warm, friendly breezes and food aplenty. No more friends everywhere. Nepeta curls closer to Equius and presses up against the soft blue down at his belly. Jade tucks her nose between Nepeta's forepaws, feathers holding the heat close to her chest. Her tail thumps gently over and slips flush between the earth and Equius' tail. Jade's flank is warm against Nepeta's, and Equius sets his big head down at Jade's back, holding the warmth in for the three of them.

It's friendly, warm and intimate, and maybe they are all alone, cold and hungry at the end of the world, but at least they have each other.

Nepeta licks Jade's head and snuggles back into Equius as she lets herself drift off to sleep.

Jade catches it first. Her entire body jolts upright and her green eyes go wide. She sniffs the air, tongue lolling free, and then she squeaks and races to Nepeta's side.

Something smells different. From the east and not too far—it smells green. Not like volcanic dust and sulfur, not like acid and rot. It's the green of free vegetation, and Nepeta's heart jumps into overdrive in her chest.

They run. The three of them tear over the ashy ground, footprints left ragged in their wake. Nepeta makes the rock face first, her claws scraping against the ice and the rotting lichens that cling there as she scales it. It's not tall and as she comes over the tiny crest, every inch of her stops dead.

It's green. For acres a forest stretches out. It's thin, half the trees felled like the thousands they've passed on their voyage, but the other half stand tall and hold up branches to the black sky that are still full of green, healthy leaves. It smells like life, animals living in the trees that Nepeta's nocturnal eyes can pick out even from here. And all of it is beautiful.

Jade laughs. The laughter tumbles out of her like birdsong and Nepeta can't help but join in. Equius chuckles like a rockslide.

This place is tiny. It's miniscule and it won't sustain them for long, but it's green. It's living and beautiful and lush, the scent of the thin forest mouthwatering and thick with memories of home. Of before the world ended. And maybe they will have to leave this place, but for now it's a tiny slice of heaven for their tired, acid-worn feet and their threadbare hearts. If this little oasis is here, there has to be more of them nearby.

This is what hope feels like. Nepeta never wants to lose it again.

Jade licks ash from Nepeta's jaw, her eyes still smiling. Equius sidles up next to Jade on the other side, the two of them pressing close and intimate, and Nepeta has never loved two people more in her life. She chirps to them, nuzzles them both to let them know how much she cares, and then she hops from the rock and leads them into the heart of this glorious green haven.