hello! could you write some headcanons or a one shot about dating lottie in the wilderness??
For sure sweetie. Here you go, enjoy!
I had like six more pharagraps but Tumblr is a coward and didn't let me save them :'(.
Contains: description of wounds, lots and lots of crying, (not my happiest work).
It was at Randy's party that you and Lottie first shared a kiss. With the taste of beer on her tongue, she approached you, intent on finally telling you how she felt. She found you alone, drinking the remaining alcohol from your cup. It was incredibly hard for her to connect her words, which came out more as a string of closely related words than an actual phrase.
You understood what she meant -sort of- and were the first one to ask her about how she felt. For Lottie kissing you was a delight.
But after the party, neither of you made the effort to sit next to each other on the plane. You needed to win nationals, there was no time for unnecessaries feelings.
You were surprised when instead of being greeted with Seattle's skyline, you felt dirt and sand on your skin and a horrible throbbing pain on your side.
Lottie was the first to greet you when you woke up. "The plane has crashed" she says, and she doesn't even try to sugarcoat it. It's the very first thing you hear waking up in your new life.
Her eyes are distant, fear and horror having left behind numbness. It's like she's not even here.
She will stay at your side all day long, tending at your wound periodically until Misty comes.
When night falls she sleeps soundly near you, cradling your weak body in hers.
Hours later, when Taissa discovers a lake, Lottie is the one to help you move. You are leaning on her and she's so careful to move you as best as she can. She's careful, slow and when no one is near, whispers sweet reassurances to you.
The days pass. Everyone tries their best to survive. You can't do anything besides sitting around and checking on your wound, getting redder and redder until a crust forms on it. Then, with a little patience, you can finally help. Both you and Lottie work on the same stuff. If you're gathering herbs, she is too; if you are taking the place of Mari as a cook, she's the one to hand you ingredients.
As time goes on, you can feel something shifting in Lottie's demeanor. She's numb, silent and spends an awful lot of time with Laura Lee.
Your jealousy takes the better of you, and for a while, you don't talk to Lottie. And she doesn't talk to you either. You're left alone with the presence of the trees on your head, until she is the first one to make a move.
She sits next to you, silent. You can feel something in her changing, killing the sweet Lottie you knew. It's then that she tells you about what's bothering her. She sees things.
Your sweet Lottie sees things. Shadows moving in the dark corners of the room, in the darkness that seeps out of the trees, whispers and voices telling her what to do, how to act. She has visions: of death, of fire and frost, of hunger.
For a while you are terrified of Lottie. You don't mean to, really, but what she said to you that afternoon made you wary of her. Who knows what she could do to appease her voices.
So you drift further apart, further and further until autumn comes. It's clear to all of you that death is close. There's no food and the days are cold. So, in the last attempts to make your life worthy, you threw a party. One of those that you went to before the crash, only with no music and homemade alcohol.
At homecoming, you finally try to open your heart to Lottie once more. It's scary, it's sad, but she allows you into her own. The rest of the night is spent laughing, holding her close to you and waiting for death to come. But it doesn't. You wake up hours later, the dust of the earth in your eyes and the sparks of the fire dying next to you.
You had slept for the entirety of the night, oblivious of what happened. No one is interested enough to tell you, and you will come to know it the day after, when Jackie and Shauna fight. Thinking that they had let their hunger run rampant enough to threaten the lives of their friends scares you, but not as much as you thought. Maybe you wished Travis died. Maybe you could finally satiate your hunger.
After Jackie's death, Lottie grows more deranged. You know that she means no harm, but through her delusions, she managed to hold a tool on the entirety of the group. You attend her prayers in the morning, more to fill that hole in her chest than helping yourself. Or maybe, you too need just a little bit of faith.
There is not one day where Lottie isn't near you. She follows you like her shadows follow her, her eyes always on you. It creeps you out sometimes, but you let her. She will randomly go out in the wilderness and come back with herbs and plants she will boil to make you a cup of tea. It's a small gesture, one that you grow to hold dear.
In return, you bring her all the trinkets you find while helping Natalie and Travis hunt. The girl has grown wary of you, annoyed at how you always have to stop to collect some strange sticks, rocks, shells and remains of animals. She had even begun to scream at you once, but you had to endure and bite your tongue.
She will always wait for you with one of her many beverages. Lottie will never tell you that the reason they are uncharacteristically dark is because she let a few drops of her blood in, in an attempt to shield you from whatever the wilderness had in store for you. Maybe it's an attempt on her part to bring herself with you, to make you feel less lonely in that cold hell.
When you eat Jackie, you find Lottie outside in the snow, clinging to where her heart is. She would want nothing more than to wail right now. Her stomach is filled, and she so wished it wasn't.
You take her and kiss her tears away, but nothing will erase her guilt. Both of you cry, hugging each other while snow falls.
Lottie never does anything out of pure malice. Every little thing she does is for the better good, but she knows she's flawed. Somehow, it seems like everything she does is a burden, making people turn against her.
There are moments of happiness even in the most difficult of situations. Sometimes you will walk in the wilderness, letting the snow cling to your boots and cold air fill your lungs. The forest is silent, but you're okay with that. There isn't any need to talk. There's just you and her, embracing each other's company.
You will never forgive yourself for not intervening when Shauna attacks Lottie. You're just too out of it. All you can see is a blur of figures moving, red spilling from them. When you understand that it's Lottie's blood, finally you understand what is happening.
Worry and horror fills you as you fall to the floor, checking Lottie.
Her flesh is red and puffy, blood seeps from cuts near her eyes and brows, flows down her nose and stains her clothes. She doesn't respond to your cries.
You nurse her back to health, regularly checking on her with Misty. Cleaning her wounds, helping her bathe and clothe her as best as you can. Sometimes she'll mumble through her fever, words coming out jagged. She asks you to not let her body go to waste, to eat her if she dies. The mere thought of that makes your skin crawl. You try to reason with her but it's no use, she needs to hear it. So you accept.
The first thing Lottie does when seeing you after waking up is cry. She's not happy to be alive. Maybe she wished for you to consume her so she could finally be at peace, away from this place. But that does not happen. That night, you don't let her go back. As much as she could protest, you don't want to share her to the others yet.
"I am sorry". She doesn't tell you why, but deep down you know the reason. You hug her close, hiding your face onto her neck, "Please...never say anything like that ever again". She falls silent. It takes a moment for her to actually feel the desperation and sadness grow in her heart, but when it does, it breaks her. She almost falls in your arms, hands shaking and tears stinging at her flesh. She wails, like a hurt animal. You embrace her and cry, mourn with her. Words don't come easy, but as you spell them, a small hope flickers in your chest.
"I promise to you, everything will be okay"