they won't ask you why (they'll just watch you die) ➴ homeplot

[burnwithus]

I taste ash on my lips, heavy and choking. It's in the air, along with the smell of coal fires that only remind me of District 12.

District 12.

My eyes snap open, face pressed against the fallen ash. Trying not to breathe it in. There was a disease that all the miners got after too many years of working, a cough that no amount of salve could take away. Black Lung Disease, my mother used to call it. I already feel the burning begin in my lungs as I pick myself up from the floor. This was District 12, and it didn't feel like a nightmare. After a year and a half of fighting them repeatedly, I knew all of my nightmares.

This was something else. This was...focus. I press a hand against the scar on my temple, the one I automatically associate with confusion in hopes that it will help me think. It doesn't. After a minute I give up on trying to figure out why and focus more on figuring out where I am. In the distance, the red flames of the slag heap are still visible. With all that residual coal dust, it might be burning forever. Still burning, I think numbly, reaching automatically for the quiver at my shoulder, except it isn't there. Just the knife I sleep with underneath my pillow.

Out of the corner of my eye, I spot something beginning to move. Someone. Multiple people whose faces I can't quite make out. How is this even possible? There was no one left alive after the firebombing, except those that Gale managed to get out.

Maybe it's the dead. It sounds ridiculous, but if this is a dream, if it's my dream...it's entirely possible.

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[worldisburning.livejournal.com]

There's nothing familiar about the vista that he opens his eyes in. There's nothing but the taste of ash, the smell of burning. Every breath too shallow in a way that reminds him of being down the minds; an awareness that every breath could be your last. He lifts his head, wiping his face, ash already smeared on his cheek.

"Katniss?"
There are other people here. Her's is just the first name on his lips.

[seek-to-end.livejournal.com]

Of all of Harry Potter's nightmares, not one had been about fire. They either made no sense whatsoever or were cold, cold and dark and lonely and terrifying, Voldemort tugging at that part of Harry's soul which he owned. Harry might awake drenched in sweat, but never because of heat. He never smelled the cloying scent of burning heavy in the air nor felt ashes falling on his cheek, lighter than snowflakes.

So it was a kind of morbid curiosity that made Harry wake now without screaming, without jerking away from the unfamiliar softness coating a hard ground that was definitely not his hammock. He opened his eyes slowly, unsurprised to find that everything blurred into a wall of varying shades of gray, something redder, bloodier in the distance. Groping for his glasses, he found them roughly where they should have been and popped them on. The scene around him certainly looked like something that would have fit in his nightmares, only it was entirely unfamiliar and flecked with ash. Frowning, Harry sat up and tried to wipe his glasses off with his shirt, only succeeding in smearing everything to a more transparent film.

Scrambling to his feet, Harry's survival instincts kicked in. He reached for the hawthorne but of course found no wand. He only had himself in completely unfamiliar territory, what looked like a war zone.

Harry cursed under his breath, feeling something inside him start to vibrate with panic. No Ron, no Hermione, not even bloody Draco. Just... Katniss. Other people, too. Gale, he thought the one bloke's name was. But the others were strangers to him.

So it was to Katniss he made his demands. "What the hell?"

[chose.livejournal.com]

She wakes up coughing for breath, and considering how things went down the last time this happened to her, Buffy is none too thrilled. Nothing is recognizable, everything dark and quickly going up in smoke, nothing at all like the island, or even Sunnydale. Strangely enough, that comes as a comfort: at least her loved ones are safe from this, whatever this may be. If she didn't know better, she might mistake the ash falling from the clouds for snow, but those are clouds of smoke, and the only way cold could be used to describe the scene has nothing to do with the temperature.

Rising to her feet, she tries to wipe the soot from her clothes but soon gives up, the endeavor pointless. Whether this is another dream or not, she can't just stand around, she has to do something. She just doesn't know what.