-- how it feels to be afraid [knox]

He’d wandered into the dungeons on accident and gotten lost. He couldn’t feel the earth, and it made him nervous. He walked with a hand on the stones that lined the walls. What did he know about being lost? Take only right turns unless you can’t turn right. If you’re under something, go up when you can. Avoid going into dark corners. Avoid sinister people. Better yet, avoid all people because they were most likely going to be thunders or fires, and they were most likely going to kick his butt to Pluto and back again. He took a deep breath. The best thing to do in a maze was to not get nervous and lose his head. If he lost his head, he definitely never get out of here, and he needed to get upstairs again, preferably without getting beat up or carried out in a body bag, whether due to injuries or because he’d died of starvation in a little corner. None of those options appealed to him at all. He just wanted to get upstairs, out fo the castle, and spend the weekend at home hiding under his blanket so he could calm down and hopefully not have a nervous breakdown and have even more of a bully problem. Being electrocuted was high on his list of things not to do.

He was approaching a corner and was just about to poke his head around it before he turned right when he nearly ran into someone. He took a step back quickly. His stomach jumped into his skull and his heart dropped into his feet. Adrenaline rushed into his arteries, spreading through his system. Any leftover digestion from breakfast slowed down as he froze, the fear spreading over his face like someone had splashed it over him. The epinephrine shot his heartbeat skywards in speed and made his breath come with more difficulty as his lungs received quick, shallow breaths in the search for oxygen with which to flood his capillaries. He couldn’t fight. He didn’t know where he’d get the earth or the plants or what was he supposed to do? He wasn’t any good at fighting. He felt like he was about to throw up. No, he shouldn’t be so nervous. Being nervous would show, and they’d just draw it out longer to see him squirm.

Hazel eyes dropped to the person in front of him the minute his mind thought of the fact that he’d heard some sort of scream when they’d met. Black hair. Familiar face. He sucked in a breath, and released it in a sigh of relief that let his chest drop slightly. His hand found itself downward from where it had curled around his neck, a cry of surprise stuck in his throat, to his heart, where it rested. He could feel the still-nervous beat against his palm, through his button-down shirt. He closed his eyes for a moment, taking two or three deep breaths. His heart took its time slowing down, but finally it returned to a beat he could at least talk through, even if talking was a difficult enough otherwise. He graced a small smile for the familiar face. She wasn’t a fire. She wasn’t a thunder. She wasn’t an enemy. He was safe. Hopefully they’d remain safe for the time being. If they ran into someone els,e he wouldn’t know what he was doing, and he didn’t know if she was a fighter either. If she wasn’t, they really needed to find someone who could help them or figure out some sort of escape strategy.

They were so dead.

“I… I’m… a little-little lost,” he admitted after a moment, blushing. He didn’t like being lost. He wished he had a map of the downstairs, though he felt that would probably work against the idea of hiding the dorms for the fire students. He didn’t want to know where they were either. That was the better idea. He would avoid them if he did know, though, so maybe he should wish for that instead. He took another deep breath. He could barely remember how he’d even gotten lost. He’d been listening to music and thinking, taking a relaxing walk, and now… now he was god only knew where downstairs somewhere. He really needed to stop zoning out while he was thinking. He needed to think in safer places maybe. Places where he wouldn’t wander into areas where there would be students who would take pleasure in kicking his butt. Knox didn’t mind astronomy lessons, but he had no desire to visit Pluto or any of the other planets. He liked it here on earth. The adam’s apple bobbed noticeably in his neck as he thought about the mere idea of being in space. Unpleasant. “Wh-what about… what about you?”

Conversation was filled with action and reaction. There was the incitations, the beginning, and one had to react to that. The initiator reacted to that, and so on and so forth. Everything started somewhere, and thereafter provided a chain of events that took the form of physical action and verbal as well as nonverbal communication. People communicated with their bodies as much as with their words. Words had a meaning, but that was not set, and could change depending on the delivery, the tone, the posture of the person and his or her facial expressions. Language was always understood in a context. The changing context changed the meaning of the language, so sometimes one word could lose its original meaning, completely replaced by something that context had fed to it.

People were much the same. They reacted to the things around them. Light let them see. The sense of touch let them perceive heat, pleasure, and all the other things that were out there. Sound waves could be interpreted because they passed through the ears. The olfactory sense in the nose allowed people to understand scents; taste buds provided the thing for which they were named. Humans could only react to their surroundings, and that reaction, in turn, required another reaction from the environment or the people around them. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, according o a scientist whose name he couldn’t remember when put on the spot. He felt he was accomplished for remembering as much as he had, especially considering he hadn’t taken a physics class in a couple of years, and then hadn’t been interested enough to make sure he’d remember it. Physics, biology, chemistry… the sciences were beyond him, though more appealing by far than mathematics. He much preferred language to both.

He also preferred not getting lost to actually doing, proving as life usually did that one could not always have the things one wanted. He doubted Sandra was any more excited about being lost, though she seemed pleased to find out that there was someone familiar down here, someone who was older than her, and someone who most definitely was not hostile. He didn’t think he’d ever been openly hostile. Was there any aggression in his system? Probably, considering he had testosterone and there was something about the hormone that caused aggression, but he didn’t think he’d ever had an excess of it. Anger… anger escaped him. Things just didn’t really make him angry, most of the time. Was that abnormal?

Where it was or not was irrelevant to their escape, to be honest, so he needed to focus.

He didn’t find the humor in her statement, personally, but that was probably because he wasn’t very good at laughing at himself. He was just embarrassed at what had happened, and that was it. He didn’t know how to get out of ehre, and he really wished he did. So he shook his head at her question, words trying to order themselves properly in his head. Any suggestions? Maybe he should share the plan he’d been following previously, though it hadn’t gotten him anywhere yet. Maybe it would eventually. They could also cause some sort of scene, but that was mostly guaranteed to get them in trouble. A deep breath inflated his chest for a moment as he looked around. “Take… t-take rights until y-you get out-out?” he mumbled, not meeting her eyes. That was easier by the fact that he was taller than her by several inches and could jsut stare at her forehead rather than at her eyes. It was a bit of a relief, because looking into another's eyes could be very uncomfortable. What could they see when they looked in his? What could they see he didn't want them to?

“Then… then you d-don’t go-go down-down-down the s-stairs?” he mumbled nervously, blinking at her. Why go down the stairs after all? Going down the stairs would not get them out of here. In fact, going down the stairs would probably get them even closer to the fire dormitories, which was definitely not a good idea. He couldn’t control the rocks around them , so he was at a complete disadvantage in a fight. He wasn’t sure if Sandra could pull water out of the air. If she couldn’t, they were screwed over if they ran into someone unfriendly. Maybe they could avoid a fight, to be honest. Sandra could be sweet, right? Maybe they’d meet a possibly nice fire. Maybe they could not mention their elements and just say they had gotten lost. The thunders lived in a tower, right? They could say they’d been taking a walk and that they’d gotten lost and just wanted to go back to their dorm. They could find their way away from the tower much more easily than finding their way out of the maze down here. She was right. They were in a maze, so they needed a technique to get out of the maze. So they wouldn’t go down the stairs, even if that was the next right.

And if there were stairs up, you took those even if it wasn’t a right. They had to go up, after all, so they could get tot eh surface, because they were underground. That all seemed perfectly natural to him, at least. Sure, getting lost in the first place wasn’t natural, but there was potential for a natural reaction otherwise. His natural reaction was to be nervous and afraid, with the adrenaline pumping through him as he tried to find his way out of the dungeons and God only knew what else was to be found down here. He remembered enough history to know that some pretty gruesome stuff had gone on down in the dungeons of castles hundreds of years ago. Torture and murder had been all too common back then. Hell, those things were still common nowadays—in some places. Arms being pulled apart until the joints dislocated. The spine being wrenched apart until the whole body shut down. He shuddered just at the thought, hoping that such a thing would never happen to him. He didn’t want something like that happening to him, and he didn’t know enough about the extents of the fires to be sure that, if caught by the wrong one, such a thing would be avoided. Ah, pessimism, what worries it could supply.

He decided that it would be best to follow her when she beckoned, unknowingly agreeing that they were better off together than apart. At least, if they were together, there would always be a witness to something going on. If they were apart, the fires down here could be as mean as they wanted and everything would be left to name-calling and “he said” to “she said” which never ended well. Only bruises and wounds would tell the story then, but even those weren’t reliable. After all, somethings could be self-inflicted. Besides, if they stuck together, they could find their way out together, rather than one finding the way and the other remaining completely lost.

If only they had some string or something they could use to know where they’d been before.

He reached into his pockets, looking for anything that could possibly be useful. He didn’t usually carry around pens or markers, and they wouldn’t have made a very noticeable mark on the stone walls anyway. A knife would have allowed scratching, but that would be defacing school property (now that he thought about it, the same thing could be applied to markers) and he really didn’t want to do something like that. He didn’t have any rocks or something anyway that he could leave on the corners. If he had something like that anyway, some troublemaker could come along and move them, and that wouldn’t be any help anyway. He sighed softly as he followed her, almost not hearing her question. When he did, he looked up from his feet, which he’d been gazing at as he walked, and his eyes met the back of her head as he followed. He bit his lip for a minute, embarrassed. “I.. I w-was just wa-wande-wandering…” He shrugged it off, swallowed, and tried to think of something more to say. Why not reciprocate the question? He could do that. After all, it only required one word. “You?” Conversation. Conversation was good. Maybe she would the sort who could just take charge and he wouldn’t have to stutter too much.

Knox was incredibly shy. This was as obvious as the nose on his face, when he wasn’t hiding behind a book or a shelf or some other thing that would do well not to draw attention to him. He didn’t like talking in front of people. He wasn’t much fond of people, as a whole, though individuals could be okay. He was okay when he was talking with someone one-on-one because he didn’t get quite as nervous. Of course, that didn’t mean he particularly enjoyed talking to people. He still stuttered, and he hated his stutter. It annoyed him to no ends, but he had yet to figure out a way out of it, away from it, or how to be done with it. It was extraordinarily irritating. Even when he was with those he liked and trusted, he couldn’t completely be rid of it. Sure, he stuttered less in their company, but it wasn’t as easy as he wanted it to be. Nothing was ever as easy as he wanted it to be. If it were, life would be easier by a long shot, and he probably wouldn’t be lost in the dungeons of the castle where he went to school (it sounded immensely like Hogwarts when put like that) with no way out but luck, hope, and strategy. He was so screwed over it wasn’t even funny.

He wasn’t good in tense situations anyway. He wasn’t good at thinking on the spot. He scared easily, and he was rather frightened at the moment. He was scared of what would happen. He was scared of the potential. It was a stupid thing to be scared of unless you used the fear to your advantage and used it to prepare in case the potential became reality. He wasn’t able to do that. He was nervous, and everything was serving only to make that worse. It was too quiet down here. He didn’t like the silence. He’d feel better if at least he was hearing footsteps, but even their feet on the floor seemed oddly quiet. A hand went up to rub his elbow as he looked around. He’d be fine hearing an explosion if only there were some sort of sound to let him know there was life out there. He was frightened like a rabbit and he couldn’t shake that feeling. Part of him really wished she were with them, so she could hug him and tell him all would be well, but she wasn’t here and wishing was stupid and pointless. He needed to focus his mind on actually getting out of there—and helping Sandra get out of there. They were in an equally uncomfortable position. They were both at an extreme disadvantage, after all.

“We-we-we…”