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warning: this chapter contains slightly triggering topics, please take care!
THE DARKNESS WAS A CONTRADICTION. It stretched around her, infinite and expansive, yet it crushed her, shrinking and suffocating. At first, she thought she was dreaming, that it was just one of those strange dreams she had where there was no sound and no people. Dreams where it was just her, stood in the middle of nothing but black. It was like she was stood in a starless night sky only it was lifeless and terrifying. In her dreams, she'd stand there for what felt like hours, unable to move, the darkness would suck the life from her bone and she'd lose herself, for a moment, in the blur of dreams that were meant to be her safe haven. But the second Marley opened her eyes, she knew this was different. It wasn't a darkness born of dreams but a darkness born of nightmares, of something out of her control. The kind of darkness that seeped into your soul, clouding your eyes as you fell under and into its grasp.
Her eyes cracked open and in poured the light; dull and red. It wasn't the same light of her, and eventually Elijah's (when Abby finally let him out of Medical), compartment she'd grown used to over the past few days. That was a bright light - one that flooded the room at exactly 7 am, an alarm clock to wake camp for breakfast and their morning duties.
Marley squinted with a groan, rubbing her hand over her forehead. There was a throbbing pain there, hamming inside her skull. She'd felt that pain before, a few too many times and the fear crept into her heart, begging that she wasn't right about its cause. When she finally ran her fingers over the source of the pain, trembling hands terrified of what they'd find, she had to bite onto her lip to stop herself from crying out. The tips of her fingers came away coated in crimson. Blood. She could even feel it running down the back of her neck, matting her hair, small red rivulets pooling onto her shirt and jacket.
She wouldn't have been nearly as terrified if she knew: one, where she was. Two, why she was even there. And, three, what had even happened to lead her there. All she could see was shapes and colours behind the blur obscuring her vision. The world was topsy turvy, like she was being spun endlessly. Nothing was coming into focus so it was nearly impossible to answer her questions until the dizziness subsided and she felt normal again. Marley blinked furiously, trying her best to regain some semblance of normality in her vision. After a few seconds — seconds which seemed to drag on for hours — the world came back into focus. It was as if she'd slipped on a pair of glasses. But even then, much to her distress, she still didn't really know where she was.
She was surrounded by dinted, dirty metal, great swooping arches of the stuff. But at least she was still in camp and not lost somewhere in the trees outside. It still didn't bring much relief; if her brain wasn't so hazy, maybe she'd had been able to figure it out exactly where she found herself but her thoughts wouldn't form into coherent sentences, they were just awkwardly yelled words that made no sense in her current state. Tools she didn't know how to use littered the benches, strewn beside jagged metal contraptions that she didn't know the use of. The scent of oil lingered thickly in the air. She knew she was in engineering (even with her muddled thoughts, that much was obvious) but she didn't even really know where that was. Marley had no need to be down there - she was pretty sure she'd be hopeless at all that mechanical stuff - so she hadn't even bothered to learn its location. She knew where her room and the food hall where she worked was - and that's all she needed to know. Engineering was about as unfamiliar to her as the Earth had been the first time she'd stepped off the dropship those few months ago. So why was she there?
