✿ 　lace　　 Dividers

SURVIVOR’S GUILT.

until dawn

[chris hartley x fem! oc]

major trigger warnings below!

(general until dawn warnings)

The powdery snow clung to his boots, dragging him down with every desperate step as he ran for his life. Each breath burned in his lungs, turning to mist in the freezing air, but he couldn’t stop—not now.

Behind him, the forest erupted with chaos. Trees shook violently as the creature flung itself from branch to branch, its guttural snarls echoing through the night like a death knell. The sound grew closer—too close—leaves rattling, snow falling in its wake.

He stumbled, nearly falling, and dared a glance over his shoulder. Nothing. Just shadows. But he could feel it. Watching. Hunting.

Then came the screams—high-pitched, raw, and final. One by one, his friends’ voices were swallowed by the dark, their cries splintering the silence like shattered glass. Each scream ripped into him, another weight on his back, another name he couldn’t save.

Still, he ran. Into the dark. Into the unknown. Because whatever it was, it was behind him now—and it was hungry.

“Chris!”

That voice—so achingly familiar—pierced the night. Raw. Afraid.

Juliet.

Tears blurred his vision. His breath caught in his throat. Should I turn around? The question struck him like lightning, but there was never really a choice.

His feet skidded in the snow as he pivoted sharply, shouting her name with everything he had left. “Juliet?!”

The snow be damned—he ran. Faster than before. Toward her voice. Toward the only thing that mattered.

But the woods weren’t silent anymore. Not entirely. The crunch of his boots mingled with something… wetter.

The snow beneath him, once untouched and glistening under the moonlight, was now tainted.

Stained.

Dark blotches marred the white, the kind that refused to melt or disappear. The trees around him leaned in, casting warped shadows like grasping fingers, and though the color was lost in the night, the scent said it all.

A sharp, metallic tang curled into his nostrils—thick and suffocating.

Blood.

His stomach churned. Every instinct screamed at him to stop. To run the other way. But he didn’t. He couldn’t.

Chris barreled forward, following the trail. The stains grew bolder, darker. No longer scattered drops—they were streaks now. Smears. Pools.

And then—

The cabin came into view, its windows hollow and black like vacant eyes.

Something was waiting.

Another blood-curdling scream tore through the cabin’s walls—raw, jagged, and unmistakably Juliet’s.

The front door hung crookedly on its hinges, still ajar from his frantic escape earlier. He hadn’t looked back then. Hadn’t dared. Not after what he’d seen.

He hadn’t known she was still alive.

Chris froze for half a second as the memory crashed into him: the sickening thud of her body slamming into the wall, the way she crumpled like a rag doll, red pouring from her head, painting her face in streaks. She hadn’t moved. He thought—he knew—she was gone.

But she screamed. And that meant she was still fighting.

Shoving the memory aside, Chris surged forward, bursting through the doorway. The cold hit him first—but it wasn’t the air. It was something else. A wrongness.

The house was a war zone.

His eyes scanned the dark interior, following the trail of red across warped floorboards. It was everywhere.

Thick puddles congealed in corners, sticky and black in the moonlight. Smears were dragged across walls like desperate handprints. Splashes painted the stairs. And then there were the chunks—unidentifiable pieces of something organic. Meat, maybe. Bone. Torn clothing. He didn’t want to know.

The scent was overwhelming now. Rotting copper and decay, a heavy weight in the air that clung to his clothes, his throat, his soul.

He swallowed hard, the urge to vomit crawling up his chest—but he kept going.

“Juliet?” he called out, quieter this time. More a plea than a shout.

Only silence answered.

For now.

Upstairs was the first option.

Chris swallowed hard as he crept up the staircase, carefully sidestepping the steps he knew would creak. Every sound felt like a gunshot in the silence that surrounded him—deafening and unnatural, ringing in his ears with the weight of fear.

At the top stoop, he drew in a shaky breath, then turned left, slipping into the great room.

The moonlight poured in through the high windows, the only thing cutting through the darkness. His boots made soft, wet squeaks as he walked, the soles still damp from the snow.

Without his glasses, everything was a blur. He stumbled over furniture and broken things—debris left behind from the violent fight that had nearly torn the room apart. The fight that had thrown Juliet across the room like a rag doll. The one that had left her still, bloodied, and silent. He’d thought that was the end.

A low, guttural growl rolled out from somewhere deeper in the cabin—a sound so wrong it made his skin crawl. It clicked between tones, shifting unnaturally as it grew louder with each step.

Chris blinked hard, trying to see. His hands reached out for walls, familiar furniture, anything to guide him forward. He followed memory more than vision, navigating the cabin he’d stayed in so many times before.

Then—he heard it.

A whimper. So faint it could’ve been the wind. But no. He knew that sound. He’d know it anywhere.

Juliet.

With cautious, quiet steps, he slipped into a side room, the guttural clicking growing fainter behind him. The door creaked slightly as he pulled it nearly shut, the shadows swallowing them both.

“Juliet?” he whispered, falling to his knees on the plush carpet.

“Chris?”

It was her.

A rush of breath escaped him, part relief, part disbelief. He reached out for her, pulling her trembling body against him. She was soaked in blood—shaking, broken—but alive.

“Hey… it’s okay. I’m here,” he whispered, brushing a matted clump of hair away from her face. His fingers stuck to it, wet with something warm. Part of him was grateful he couldn’t see clearly—grateful the details were just a smear in the dark.

“You left me,” she sobbed into his chest, her voice hoarse and aching.

“What? No…” he shook his head, voice cracking, chin resting on her blood-matted hair.

“You did! I was left here—all alone!”

“Hey… hey, shh… we have to be quiet,” he murmured, heart pounding.

Her blood soaked through his coat like melting snow, hot and endless.

“Wh… where are you bleeding?” he asked, the words barely escaping him.

She pulled back slightly, the moonlight hitting her just enough to paint her outline.

“Everywhere,” she whispered.

She took his hand in hers, guiding it slowly up to her face.

The moment his fingers touched her skin—or what was left of it—he froze. He wanted to pull away, wanted to scream, but his body locked in place.

The flesh from the center of her cheek down to the edge of her jaw was gone. Peeled away. De-gloved. Nothing left but exposed muscle and gleaming red, like raw meat glistening in the cold light.

A scream tore from Juliet’s throat—shrill, raw, and unearthly. It echoed like a banshee wailing in the hills of Ireland, a harbinger of death.

Then—

Crash.

The door behind them exploded open, slamming with such force the knob punched clean through the cabin wall, leaving a jagged hole behind. The hinges shrieked as they twisted, the door now hanging crooked and broken.

The creature was on them in an instant. It lunged, its maw wide, teeth gnashing with rabid fury as it went straight for Chris’s throat.

“Chris?” Juliet’s voice was faint, panicked.

He barely heard her.

His hands shot up, grappling with the thing’s face—skin rough like bark, jaws snapping like a wild animal.

“Chris!” she screamed again.

The creature’s breath was hot and fetid, its teeth clicking closer, closer, closer—

“Chris! Wake up!”

He jolted upright with a gasp, drenched in sweat.

Juliet was standing over him, her scarred face soft in the pale wash of moonlight streaming through the window.

“You okay?” she asked gently, reaching out to brush the damp hair from his forehead. Her touch was cool, grounding. Real.

“Y… yeah,” he stammered, sitting up quickly. The black leather couch groaned beneath him, the material peeling away from his sticky skin.

She crouched beside him now, studying his face. “Nightmare again?”

He nodded slowly, wiping his palms on his jeans. His heart was still hammering in his chest.

Juliet’s eyes searched his—haunted, but calm. “Same one?”

Chris swallowed hard. “Yeah. The door. that… thing. You screaming…” He trailed off, eyes drifting to the stillness of the room.

Juliet looked down for a moment, then back at him. “It wasn’t real, Chris. You’re safe.”

He shook his head slowly, eyes distant. “I can’t get the memory out of my head. It’s like it’s burned into me. What if…” his voice faltered. “What if we weren’t meant to survive? What if it comes back for us?”

Juliet didn’t answer right away. Instead, she reached for his hand, her fingers cold but steady as she gave his a gentle squeeze.

“But we did,” she said quietly. “Maybe not whole. Maybe not the same people we were when we got there. But we made it out. We survived.”

“Barely,” he muttered, voice thick with exhaustion. He dragged his free hand down his face, then slipped his glasses off and rested them in his lap.

The silence lingered between them like smoke—heavy, suffocating.

Juliet leaned back, her eyes scanning the window, the pale snowfall still drifting outside like nothing had ever happened.

“We lost everything up there,” Chris said after a moment, staring blankly at the floor. “Friends. Our sanity. I don’t even know how to live normally anymore. Everything feels like… like it’s waiting to go wrong again.”

Juliet nodded slowly, her thumb brushing over the back of his hand. “I know. I feel it too.”

She hesitated, then added, “Sometimes I wake up and I swear I can still hear it. The clicking. In the walls, in my dreams. Doesn’t matter. It’s just… there.”

Chris looked over at her, eyes sharp behind the tiredness. “Then maybe we didn’t really make it out. Not all of us.”

Juliet didn’t respond. She just held his hand a little tighter.

“God,” Chris muttered, voice cracking as he pulled his hand away from Juliet’s, “if I could just go back in time… tell those idiots not to prank Hannah, none of this would’ve happened.”

The anger in his voice was raw, but underneath it, grief bled through. He buried his face in his palms, elbows resting on his knees like the weight of the memory might crush him.

Juliet watched him for a moment, her expression unreadable.

“You couldn’t have known,” she said softly. “And even if you had—you know damn well they wouldn’t have listened.”

She eased down onto the couch beside him, sitting sideways, curling her legs up so her shoulder brushed his.

“What-ifs can’t change the past, Chris. Believe me, I’ve tried.” Her voice wavered slightly, but she held it steady. “Everything that happened… happened.”

She touched her cheek, the skin pale and ridged with scars, like melted wax.

“My face is fucked. They’re all gone. Josh is locked away in some psych ward, probably talking to ghosts…”

She paused, looking up at him.

“And you—you’re still here. You’re breathing. You still wake up every morning.”

She rested her chin gently against his knee, her voice soft but firm. “You survived, Chris. I don’t care how broken you feel. You made it through.”

He didn’t respond right away. His fingers dug into his scalp, trembling slightly.

“I don’t feel like I did,” he whispered eventually. “I feel like I left part of myself up there… with them.”

Juliet let the silence hang for a moment, then said, “Maybe we all did. But what’s left… it’s still worth something. You’re still worth something.”

She looked up at him, her scarred face lit by the moonlight. “You’re not alone, okay?”

Chris looked down at her, finally lowering his hands. His eyes were red-rimmed, but she could see the faintest flicker of life still behind them.

He nodded, just once.

“Okay,” he said, voice hoarse.

Outside, the wind howled faintly through the trees, but for now, the house held its breath.

like mother like daughter💜

By anna-laura art

“𝘭𝑜𝘷𝑒 𝑖𝘴 𝘢 𝘧𝑒𝘢𝑠𝘵; 𝑏𝘶𝑡 𝑦𝘰𝑢’𝑣𝘦 𝘭𝑒𝘢𝑟𝘯𝑒𝘥 𝘵𝑜 𝑎𝘣𝑠𝘵𝑎𝘪𝑛.”

black and white hannigram icons.

When your Character...

Gets into: A Fight ⚜ ...Another Fight ⚜ ...Yet Another Fight

Hates Someone ⚜ Kisses Someone ⚜ Falls in Love

Calls Someone they Love ⚜ Dies / Cheats Death ⚜ Drowns

is...

A Ballerina ⚜ A Child ⚜ Interacting with a Child ⚜ A Cheerleader

A Cowboy ⚜ A Genius ⚜ A Lawyer ⚜ A Pirate ⚜ A Spy

A Wheelchair User ⚜ A Zombie ⚜ Beautiful ⚜ Dangerous ⚜ Drunk

Funny ⚜ In a Coma ⚜ In a Secret Society ⚜ Injured ⚜ Shy

needs...

A Magical Item ⚜ An Aphrodisiac ⚜ A Fictional Poison

A Coping Strategy ⚜ A Drink ⚜ A Medicinal Herb ⚜ A Mentor

Money ⚜ A Persuasion Tactic ⚜ A Quirk ⚜ To be Killed Off

To Become Likable ⚜ To Clean a Wound ⚜ To Self-Reflect

To Find the Right Word, but Can't ⚜ To Say No ⚜ To Swear

loves...

Astronomy ⚜ Baking ⚜ Cooking ⚜ Cocktails ⚜ Food ⚜ Oils

Dancing ⚜ Fashion ⚜ Gems ⚜ Herbal Remedies ⚜ Honey

Mushrooms ⚜ Mythology ⚜ Numbers ⚜ Perfumes

Roses ⚜ Sweets ⚜ To Argue ⚜ To Insult ⚜ To Kiss

To Make False Claims ⚜ Wine ⚜ Wine-Tasting ⚜ Yoga

has/experiences...

Allergies ⚜ Amnesia ⚜ Bereavement ⚜ Bites & Stings

Bruises ⚜ Caffeine ⚜ CO Poisoning ⚜ Color Blindness

Facial Hair ⚜ Fainting ⚜ Fevers ⚜ Food Allergies

Food Poisoning ⚜ Fractures ⚜ Frostbite ⚜ Hypothermia

Injuries ⚜ Jet Lag ⚜ Kidnapping ⚜ Manipulation ⚜ Mutism

Pain ⚜ Paranoia ⚜ Poisoning ⚜ More Pain & Violence

Scars ⚜ Trauma ⚜ Viruses ⚜ Wounds

[these are just quick references. more research may be needed to write your story...]

Writing Resources PDFs

The ceasefire agreement was reached and joy is floating among the Palestinian people

HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE ハウルの動く城 2004, dir. Hayao Miyazaki

ready or not!

Our gorgeous queen whose scathing wit and sass is as deadly as her shooting skills,

Our cunty king who makes wrathful despair work for him and looks hot doing it,

And their snarky psychic-adjacent amalgamation with bloodthirsty homosexual tendencies….. the Hannibalverse fandom stays winning fr