hellhouse | (no subject)

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(no subject)

WHO: Jared Jacobs & Sansa Stark
WHAT: Waking up in Hell House
WHEN: Day 1, early morning
WARNINGS: tbd

You know that feeling when you wake up and you immediately know that something's wrong, more often than not, that wrong thing being that you're late?

Jared Jacobs wakes up with a start, with that feeling. He has a job interview this morning because his father finally put his foot down and said that if Jared wanted to keep living in the basement apartment, he needed to start paying rent, at least. Jared's been lazy as hell the past several years of his life. ...okay, Jared's been lazy his entire life but, in his defense, a lot of that had more to do with being bored for lack of intellectual stimulation than anything else. Somewhere in his teen years, boredom stopped being motivating and started becoming an excuse to do absolutely nothing instead of looking for ways to fill the void. Sometimes, it's not easy being a genius.

The first thing Jared notices is the darkness in the room doesn't match the pitch black of the basement apartment; there are candles lit. He doesn't do candles. Candles are for romantic dinners in the movies and girls averse to Febreeze spray.

The second thing he notices is that he's slumped over a table and there's another person across the table, bright red hair splayed out over its surface and her head down on her arms like she's getting ready to play a rousing game of Heads Up, Seven Up. That thought almost — almost — makes him laugh with its absurdity, because the third thing Jared notices is that he's dressed in a suit not unlike the one he wore to his junior prom — the last one he bothered to go to, because it was the last one when Ems was still a part of his life.

"What the fuck?" he hisses. Guess he's missing that job interview...

His head snaps over to look at the source of the sound of a machine turning on and he realizes belatedly that it looks like a record player. A flash of white-blue light in his periphery catches his eye as he shucks off the suit jacket — seriously, what the hell? — and when his eyes follow it, the shock nearly has him falling out of his chair as he shoves himself back from the table. The chair topples with a crash to the floor as he scrambles to his feet, tearing at the cuff links so he can pull up the sleeve of his left arm revealing what looks like a freaking cellphone in his arm. In his arm.

"What the fucking fuck?!" he yelps, fingers running over the seamless implantation and eyes wider than saucers. His eyes move to the girl and an even more terrifying sensation settles in the pit of his stomach. Is she dead? Is she fucking dead and he's in this, what? Dining room? By himself with a dead body and a phone in his arm and holy shit, okay, he appreciates the giant upgrade from waking up as part of a Human Centipede or something, but seriously, what the fuck?!

His chest is heaving with unsteady breaths as he walks slowly around the table and toward the girl. "Please don't be dead...oh shit, please don't be dead, don't be dead, please don't be dead..." he whispers to himself, swallowing thickly as he approaches her and reaches a shaking hand out to touch her shoulder. "Hey...hey, lady...? Oh, God, don't be dead, lady, please fucking don't be dead..."

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Sansa has a terrible headache. She suffers them from time to time, when she drinks a bit too much wine, but she doesn't recall drinking too much. She doesn't recall much of anything, which is worrisome, and when the man shakes her shoulder she lurches awake with a start.

She's not wearing a gown. She's wearing something but it seems to be sparkling in a way she's never seen and it's briefer up top than any gown she's ever made or seen before. Aside from that, there's something in her arm and she jerks away from it, crying out.

"What in Seven Hells is all of this? Who are you? Where am I?" Sansa hasn't been anywhere without a Queensguard in longer than she can remember.

When she lurches awake, Jared swears again breathlessly, jumping back and failing to judge his proximity to the wall, resulting in him bumping into it unexpectedly and startling and swearing again as he backs away from a different direction.

"First of all, that's the coolest swear of all time. I'm stealing that. Second, my name is Jared Jacobs. And third, no fucking idea. I just woke up here, too. ...I thought you were dead," he confesses.

His momentarily shock, manifesting in casual conversation, is only replaced with bewilderment when he actually notices what she's wearing and the only reason he doesn't make a stupid comment about it is because the record starts playing and the voice is so fucking creepy that he can't not pay attention to it.

Hearing the lyric, Jared rolls his eyes and looks up at the ceiling, as if that's maybe where the voice originated when it hadn't at all. "Oh, fuck you, that song is horseshit!"

Jared's attention turns back to the woman and he realizes two things: one, she's hot as hell and two, she's holding her arm away from herself like the thing in it is about to bite her. He softens a little at that. "Hey...just...they gave me one, too," he says, holding out his own arm for her to see. "Look. It's definitely fucked up, but there are worse ways we could've been altered, trust me on that one. It's just a phone. It's not a big deal."

It is a big deal, because it's embedded in his fucking arm, but he's made the realization that she's super hot and he's not trying to look like a bigger idiot than he already did. "What's your name? Let's just get out of here before Leatherface shows up or something."

Sansa has dealt with vulgar men before. She'd spent quite a bit of time in Sandor Clegane's company, once upon a time, and his words don't shock her so much as the thing that's currently in her arm. She looks at it in both horror and fascination, unsure of both the use of the device and his name for it. A phone? What is a phone?

There is no time to think upon it, though, because he's insisting that they need to get out of the room to escape someone and Sansa is inclined to agree. She doesn't know the man before her at all but since he seems as frightened as she is, perhaps he's someone she can trust temporarily. She tries to decide if she should give her proper name; names have power, after all, and if these people know they have the Queen in the North, they would have much power indeed.

"Sharra Snow," she says, thinking of the first bastard name she could come up with. It possibly might have been better to identify herself as one of the Free Folk with no surname but she's too gently reared for that. Anyone would know she'd grown up in a castle - she has to think like Arya if she means to survive this.

"What does this thing do," she asks, pointing at the phone in her arm. "Why is it here?"

Edited 2019-06-10 19:37 (UTC)

"Sharra, okay, well Sharra, let's get the hell out of here before we find out the hard way how we got here to begin with," Jared suggests, moving past her and toward the door. "Is that dress yours? This suit isn't mine, I don't ever wear this shit," he adds as he grabs the doorknob and turns it. When the pushes the door open, he looks back at her. "The phone? It...like, you can communicate with people. Call them, text them...do you really not know what a phone is or are you messing with me?" he asks, lifting an eyebrow. "As for why it's there, your guess is as good as mine and I'm honestly not sure I want to know."

As he turns back to step out into the hall, he lifts a foot to take a step, but stops short abruptly. He'd been assuming a hall would be on the other side, but instead, it looks like a greenhouse. Why the hell is a greenhouse directly attached to a dining room? What kind of idiot architect comes up with that floor plan?

"What the hell?"

The door slams shut in his face and Jared jumps a little. "Jesus, fuck. Come on, man..." he complains, reaching for the door and turning the knob again. This time, when he opens it, there's a brick wall on the other side, blocking their way out. Jared looks over at Sharra. "...tell me you saw that..."

Jared speaks rapidly and Sansa tries her best to parse all the information. A phone is for communication. Calling makes sense, somewhat - she would call out to someone to get their attention. Texting makes less sense. Texts are books or scrolls. What is texting. Sansa doesn't like appearing stupid and so she keeps her mouth shut and decides she'll wait for Jared to reveal more about how this phone works before asking questions that make her appear simple.

As to her clothing, well. It's nothing she recognizes. The bodice is tight satin or samite in a magenta color that Sansa hasn't seen outside of a King's Landing brothel and the skirt is tight until the knees where it flares out in stiff lace of the same color. There's some sort of iridescent bits sewn all along the bodice that must be made of dyed shell but Sansa isn't sure what they are - could they be something else entirely?

When they move into the next room, it seems as if this is a glass garden. There's light drifting down and dust motes in the air. There are potted plants about and she doesn't have much of a chance to get her bearings before Jared is wrenching open the door and finding nothing but bricks behind it. Why would the exit be bricked in? It makes no sense.

"I saw it," Sansa says, voice calm. "We should proceed back to the original room, I think, and see if there is another door we might take. Leave this door open, just to be certain it isn't a trick."

Leaving the door open seems like as good an idea as any, Jared thinks. She's probably right. If they close it, they could find it to have been an illusion all along and they'll have wasted their time. "Yeah, okay, good call," he agrees, even though he didn't remember seeing another door in the dining room where they'd woken up. Maybe she had and he'd just missed it.

The plants are so thick that it's kind of hard to see through them and he's mostly just hoping that they hadn't made any turns they didn't realize they'd made, because otherwise they're liable to get lost trying to go back the way they came and treating it like a straight line, which is what he's doing.

He's willing to guess they're about halfway when he hears a door slam behind them and Jared stops, turning his head. "Shit..." he mutters, sighing. Before he can bother asking if she thinks they ought to go back and re-open the door or split up and have one watch the door while the other goes to look back in the dining room, suddenly there's a hiss and a rattle above them and then he's wet. The sprinkler system has kicked on.

"Oh, come on, are you kidding me with this crap?" he cries out in frustration, wiping his face with both hands to no avail.

Sansa doesn't know why water has started pouring down on them either but she pushes at her hair, heavy and sodden now, in an attempt to get it out of her eyes. The shoes she's wearing are heeled and slick as well so she's trying to keep from sliding down onto the ground where the water's removed any traction she might have had. The plants, too, seem to be choking off her ability to move and she doesn't know if they're shifting and growing under the water or if that's just her imagination.

"Jared," she asks haltingly, trying to keep the fear from her voice. "Are the vines getting thicker now, do you think, or is it just a trick? I cannot tell. I am having trouble seeing my way because of the water."

Sansa gathers her hair in her hands and wrings it out, coiling it a bit in hopes that it won't fly back across her face and start to suffocate her again. Wherever this place is, it doesn't seem friendly to her, and while she thinks she can trust Jared himself she doesn't dare trust in anything around her.

He's running under the assumption that Sharra's right behind him, so Jared keeps moving, pushing his way through the thick foliage to get to the door. It's hard enough to see as it is, but the heavy mist that hangs in the air as the sprinklers rain icy water down on them isn't helping at all. It's the tone in her voice that has Jared turning around, slipping a little in the puddles forming on the floor under the dress shoes he'd never have chosen to wear on his own.

Noticing the state she's in, sodden and fighting both the plants and her hair, Jared holds a hand out to her to try to take hers and help her stay on her feet. He's close enough to reach, except that when he tries, he can't help noticing that she's right. The vines are thicker than they were when he'd come through that section of the greenhouse seconds ago. Maybe it's just his imagination, but he feels like something is grabbing at his calf and he kicks his leg to get it off.

"No, yeah...it's thicker. It's definitely thicker. Here, gimme your hand. I think we're almost to the door," he offers. If she were less attractive or a guy, he'd have left her in his wake by now, but it is what it is. She's pretty and he's not a complete idiot. If they're in some fucked up kidnapping situation, how unlike a horror movie could it possibly be? Maybe he's the hero in this one and the hero always gets the girl.

He kicks his leg again when it feels, again, like something is brushing up against it. His hair being as wet as it is leaves sodden bangs in his eyes, skewing his vision in addition to the thick foliage and the sprinklers, so he can't even see what it is, he just knows he wants it to stop because it's freaking him out, but he doesn't want to look like a wuss, so he's telling himself that it's in his head. There's nothing touching him. It's in his head. That's all. That's got to be all.

Sansa grips his hand tightly when he offers it because she's so afraid of losing her footing. It's damned near impossible to see between the foliage and the mist of the water and she thinks she might well be better off without her shoes. She steps out of them and goes barefoot instead, deciding to sacrifice what little protection they might have offered her for the ability to better stay upright.

"I don't know how to stop the water!" she cries out, looking up to see if there's an obvious way to make it stop. If that can stop, the rest of the things can be dealt with in short order. It seems the water is coming from bits of metal on the roof and Sansa wonders if there's a way Jared might lift her on his shoulders so she can break them off. She decides to suggest just this thing to him.

"I'm tall. Do you think you could lift me on your shoulders and I could reach up and try to break the pieces that the water is coming from? Then we'd at least have that problem solved if nothing else."

Edited 2019-06-12 19:28 (UTC)

The only thing that surprises Jared about her taking off the heels is how long it took her to decide to do it. How women can wear those things is beyond him. He'd break his neck falling. Jared keeps a tight hold on her hand as they move forward so that if she slips, she won't fall all the way down. At least, hopefully not, because he has no way of knowing if he'll be able to stay on his feet with these crappy dress shoes on, since they haven't got any treads.

"Babes, let's just leave. There's probably like a hundred of those heads we'd have to break," he calls back over the water. It isn't that he doesn't want to try so much as he's pretty sure he can't hold up her weight like that. He might be nice to look at, but he doesn't ever bother working on his body so he has a bad feeling that she tried to stand on his shoulders, they'd both wind up on the floor and he doesn't want her to know that. "Here, look, there's the door."

His free hand extends to grab the doorknob, turning it. Or...trying to. It doesn't turn. It's locked.

Jared looks around the immediate area for a power box. Those sprinklers are probably on a timer, but the timer probably has an emergency off switch, he just has to find the controls. Or, you know, try not to make an idiot of himself possibly dropping this woman if she tries to climb onto his shoulders to break them which might or might not work, anyway. "Shit..."

This time, when he feels the brush against his leg, it's aggressive and he can't just kick it off. When he looks down, there's a vine wrapping its way up his calf like a snake. "What the fuck? Get off!" He lets go of her hand to pry off the vine and the he turns to the door, slamming his hands against it. "Open the fucking door!" he bellows at whoever might hear it.

Sansa pulls at the vine wrapping around him, breaking her nails as she claws at it and manages it to yank it off. It seems as though the plants themselves seem to want to kill them and without a way to get out, she has no idea what they'll do. Panic is rising in her throat, cloying to her in a way it hasn't since Ramsay, but she has to remain calm. She has to think. If she cannot think her way out of this, she'll be lost, and she'll be of no use to herself or Jared.

"Do you think there's another way to turn the water off?" Sansa asks loudly, trying to be heard over the din of the water and the snaking vines of plants and rustle of leaves. They're running out of time, desperately so, and she needs to do something before they end up falling prey to one of the myriad traps that's been laid for them. She's been through worse experiences and survived them. She will survive this and, furthermore, she'll bring Jared through with her.

"How else could we possibly stop this water? Is there any device like this that might do it?" she asks, pointing to the phone that's been inserted into her forearm. She's never used one of these devices before but it stands to reason that possibly it might be used to control the things that are happening around them.

Jared has a very low tolerance for weird. For a guy who lives for video games, it's surprisingly low when he's facing it in the real world. Whatever is going on here, it's making him panic. Jared isn't afraid of water or getting wet and he's not even that freaked out that the door won't open, if he divorces that idea from everything else; maybe the doors are also on a timer matching the sprinklers. What's freaking him out are the vines and the way that the plants appear to be not only alive, but on the offense. He can only assume they mean to harm he and Sharra and that...that's what's fucking with him.

"There's probably a panel, a control panel," he shouts back at her over the rushing water, shuddering with cold and aggressively swatting away a vine that appears to be trying to grab him by the wrist. "There'll be a control panel. It'll be in a metal box, probably, to protect the insides from the water. I don't even know if it'll be inside this thing or if it'd be outside, because that's safer, but there'll be a control panel. Metal box. If we can find it, I can figure it out," he replies. If his voice sounds calm, it's an accident, because calm is about as far from what Jared's feeling right then as possible.

He starts to look around their immediate area. In his experience, those boxes are usually pretty close to the doors or gates of places like this. Not that he has a ton of experience and a lot of what he's drawing from has everything to do with movies and TV shows, but still.

"Do you see one?" he shouts over the water, deciding to look up to see if maybe someone put the control panel up on the ceiling where casual passersby couldn't fiddle with it and it wouldn't get wet. It takes him a minute, between having to shield his eyes from the downpour of the sprinklers, trying to gaze through the angry plantlife and water, and swatting away more vines, but he thinks he spots something. "There, do you see that? Does that look like a metal box to you?" Maybe she has a better angle, he can't tell if it's a box or if it's just part of the ceiling.

Sansa looks in the direction Jared is pointing. She doesn't know precisely what she's looking for but "metal" and "box" are things she can comprehend even if nothing else about this place seems to make sense with the things she's learned in her life back in Westeros. She gives him a quick nod; from this angle, it certainly appears it might be a metal box and therefore possibly this control panel.

"I think it is," she shouts over the water. "Let's make our way there! We'll need help to get through the vines, I think, so we'll need to go together."

Sansa has the feeling that the vines will constrict even more if they stop moving and she thinks they need to go together no matter what. No matter what happens, she will stay with Jared because she likes her chances better with him than without him. She starts moving toward the box, hoping he'll follow.

Everything about this situation is completely illogical and Jared has never really done super well with that in a real world setting. Everything has to have a reason in real life, but he can't figure out what the reason is for this. He can't figure out the reason why the sprinklers have turned on or why that had a domino effect making the plants appear to come to life. There's no reason why a dining room opened into a greenhouse or why they have cell phones embedded in their arms. With no reasons, Jared has no solutions. His brain just doesn't work like that under pressure.

So when she says that it does, in fact, look like a metal box, Jared is grateful as fuck, because it gives him some reason. Metal box, control panel, shut off the water. That problem and solution combination makes sense to him, so it lights a fire under his ass and he pulls on Sharra's arm to draw her closer so that they can go together.

"I'll try to get you up there, then I'll have to talk you through, but since I can't see from down here, you're going to have to talk me through what you see before I can talk you through how to turn the water off with it. Okay?"

"That will be all right." Sansa supposes she's just going to have to trust him to guide her through it. Making her way over toward the box seems harder and harder the longer the water goes on; she wishes she had a sword or dagger to at least hack at the vines that seem to keep winding around her arms and legs and threatening to choke them.

She keeps as close as she can to Jared, hoping that their combined strength will keep the worst of the plants from dragging them under. When she gets to where the box is, she looks back at Jared to ask him to help her reach it.

"I suppose you'll have to lift me up now? I'm ready whenever you are, Jared, I swear it."

It was almost like the longer they were in the greenhouse, the more aggressive and handsy the plants were becoming and Jared didn't like that at all. First of all, it didn't make any sense. Plants were living things, sure, but they weren't all Audrey II, for fuck's sake. Audrey II had been an alien, anyway, not a plant, if he remembered right. Second, was it literally the water that was giving them life? Because if it was, then it stood to reason that they'd die back away to the still lush but not overwhelmingly, chokingly lush state they'd been in when he and Sharra had entered the room to begin with. Somehow, Jared doubted they'd fall away that fast.

"It's really flattering that you think I'm strong enough to lift you, but you're gonna have to climb up, babes," he shouted over the rush of water as apologetically as he could manage. He crouched a little with the hopes that she would be able to get up on his shoulders if he lowered himself enough for her to climb on. Then all he had to do was stand up. ...which would probably be a lot easier said than done with the extra weight, but if he could chicken fight in the city pool, then he could do this. It was almost the same, right?

Jared braced himself and mentally prepared with the hopes that he wouldn't immediately fall over. He also made a mental note to start hitting the gym again when he got out of this dump. "Ready when you are. Go for it."

Sansa isn't certain what she feels about being called "babes" more than once by Jared when she is, in fact, Queen in the North but he doesn't know that and right now they're focused on surviving, not tossing titles about. She thinks she can forgive it. Besides, she's given him a false name anyway so even if he did recognize Sansa Stark as a queen, Sharra Snow is no one at all. Sharra Snow is some lord's bastard daughter who has somehow managed to survive a war.

When he lowers himself down, she climbs atop his shoulders and tries not to think about how intimate it is to have her body pressed against him this way. It's not something a woman does with a man she isn't married to and if the circumstances weren't what they are, she wouldn't have allowed it. Sansa wouldn't, anyway. Would Sharra? She has to decide and quickly.

She stretches as much as she can and touches the box. It seems to open and when she opens it, she calls back down to him. "What do I need to do to turn it off?"

It takes a lot more effort than Jared would like to admit to straighten himself back up once she's climbed aboard, so to speak. It doesn't occur to him that she might find any part of this situation uncomfortable, because he doesn't. The way he sees it, this is survival and it's not like they're doing anything salacious. If he knew what she was thinking, it might give Jared some well-needed perspective on his male privilege, but alas, his focus instead is on the sprinkler system.

When she calls down, he tries to look up to see what it looks like inside the box. For his effort, he gets a face full of skirt and water, so he gives up as quickly as he'd tried. "Okay, there should be, like, either a switch or a dial. I can't see, what's it look like on the inside of the box?"

If there's a dial, then it's on a timer that she'll have to manually force down to zero, he thinks. If there's a switch, it might be a little more difficult, because he imagines that the thing is still on a timer and the switch will have a delay on it. He hopes that it's either a dial or that he's wrong about the set up. It'd be so much easier if he could see. Hell, there could even be buttons; he supposes it could look like anything at all. If whoever brought them here had enough technological advancement to embed a fucking iPhone in their arms without killing them in the process by way of bleeding out or sepsis or something, then who knew what kind of tech would be running the watering system for a bunch of killer plants?

Speaking of, he could feel the vines wrapping and tightening around his legs, so he hoped to hell Sharra could reach from where he was standing, because he wasn't going to be going anywhere like that. His hands were too busy holding her up to keep her from falling to be otherwise occupied untangling his legs.

"It's round and has numbers on it. Should I turn it, then?" Sansa hasn't ever seen anything like this before in her life but she knows their time is running short. She decides to start turning the small dial back to the left, back to zero, and as she does the water sputters to a stop. She's still chilled enough that there's goosebumps all over her skin but at least the water's stopped and she'll have a chance to start drying out here shortly.

She shifts a bit atop Jared's shoulders, trying to keep her balance, and she knows that he's seeing and feeling parts of her that no man ought to see. He doesn't know who she truly is, at least, and that's a blessing but it's still damned uncomfortable. Perhaps now that the water's stopped, they can start trying to find an alternate exit to this room.

"Help me down and we can find a way out of here," Sansa says, voice firm but not unkind. The only way she can keep from losing her head is to pretend she has the situation well in hand even when she so clearly doesn't and so she must take charge of it.

"Yeah, turn it to zero," Jared replies. Relief washes over him when the water shuts off a moment later. "Sweet baby Jesus, thank you," he breathes.

His hands tighten on her knees when she starts to move. It's a reflexive move because, at first, he thinks she's falling. It takes him a second to realize that she's just adjusting and his grip loosens again. He tries to shake his sopping bangs out of his eyes, but all he probably manages is to make her more uncomfortable with the movement. "Sorry," he says quickly, realizing that a second too late.

But then she tells him to put her down and Jared can still feel the vines thick and tight, curled around his legs from his ankles up to his junk. "About that..." he says reproachfully. "I can't really move..." This is going to hurt like a fucker, isn't it? He can't just leave her up there, obviously, but he also can't crouch to let her climb down.

Sighing heavily, Jared lets go of her knees and holds his hands up higher. "Take my hands. I'm going to bend forward and tuck my chin. You're going to have to slide off and then get these fucking things off me so we can get the hell out of here, okay?" If he sounds a little bit panicked at the latter part of that, it's because a tiny part of him is a little afraid that she's going to cut and run. ...he fucking would, if he were her.

Sansa doesn't exactly slide down gracefully from her perch but she manages to get down without injuring herself or Jared and she calls that an accomplishment. When she sees how the vines have wrapped around his legs and hips. Sansa frowns a bit, trying to decide what to do about the situation, and then she decides that there's no option but the obvious.

"Don't move," she says firmly, kneeling down to start the arduous process of unwinding vines and pulling them away. She wishes she had a knife but she doesn't so she only has her hands. Ages ago, she'd be embarrassed to be this close to a man's cock, even clothed, but she's not that Sansa any longer. Now she has a job that must be done and she'll accomplish it whether or not it's uncomfortable for her to do so. It takes a few minutes but she manages.

"Sorry for the intimacy but it was necessary. Now, let's check to see if we can get the door open, yes?"

The way his arms have to stretch at somewhat unnatural angles to keep hold of her hands until she's safely on the ground and the discomfort that comes, as it turns out, with bending at the waist without letting the legs join the party tweaks the hell out of his back and shoulders and Jared growls softly to himself in an attempt to stifle a groan of pain, grimacing until she's down and he can relax and stand up again.

"Couldn't if I wanted to, babes," Jared points out, holding up both hands defensively. He doubts that her request is because she's worried about him taking an offensive move toward her and more about her worrying that him moving is going to make the vines start to behave almost like quicksand in that they'll just work harder to keep him in place. He's not entirely sure she'd be wrong if that was where her mind was.

Normally, Jared would be making a joke about her position on her knees in front of him, but given that he'd really like to get the fuck out of here, he bites the insides of his cheeks to stave off the urge to do so. She doesn't seem like she'd think it was funny, anyway, and she'd probably leave him there. He'd deserve it. Jared is a lot of things, but stupid is not one of them.

The closer she gets to his groin the more intently Jared tries to think about literally anything but what's going on below his waist. This would be a really fucking inopportune moment to pop an unwelcome boner, after all, and while he's pretty confident that his jeans would've done a good job hiding it, this fucking monkey suit probably wouldn't. Not a hot girl kneeling in front of him, untangling vines from where they've wrapped around his legs and waist straight up like something out of some kind of anime tentacle porn or some shit.

Shrinkage. Jared concentrates on the fact that he's started shivering because they're both soaked to the bone and it's dank and cool in this room. His balls are probably practically grape-sized by now. Maybe the chill is coming from the fear still scratching at the back of his mind after all this, but whatever the source of it, whether physical or psychological, it's got him feeling like he just stepped out of an icy river. Can't get a hard-on when he's fighting shrinkage, right?

Jared is so deep in his own head to make sure that this doesn't get awkward as fuck on them both that he almost misses what Sharra says when he's been freed. "Oh, shit, I don't even care. You can do whatever you want if it means getting me out, babes, I'm good. It's all good. So yeah, let's book it. I'm not staying for round two in this bitch."

He starts to move without her but pauses. "You good?" he asks, offering one hand for her to take since the foliage is still unnaturally thick and he doesn't want to lose her if she doesn't want to potentially be lost.

Sansa doesn't allow people to touch her, normally, but she's touched Jared enough in the last little while that the offer of his hand is nothing in the grand scheme. She takes it gratefully and squeezes it a bit in gratitude. She doesn't want to seem ungrateful for his help even if she's wary of the situation they've been put into. It seems wrong to deprive herself of a potential ally.

"I don't know if we'll be able to get out but at least the plants seem to be less...aggressive." It seems as if they're not clinging quite as much as they had when the water had rained down upon them and if the water had caused them to grow up and threaten to engulf them, removing that at least made this bearable again.

Now that the water is gone, though, Sansa is quite cold and her gown is brief up top. Queen of Winter she might be but she is not immune to winter's chill and she begins to shiver a bit, goosebumps rising up on her skin. "Hopefully we find out way soon...I'm quite cold now."

At her comment, Jared looks around a little. "...yeah, no, I think you're right. I think we need to get out before it turns back on again. Who knows how long that timer was set or how often it's supposed to go off," he replies, frowning as they start to move closer to the door. He can see it, but it's still several yards away.

"I'd give you my jacket, because you look like you're freezing, but it's back in that dining room," he says almost apologetically. Women really get the shit end of the fashion stick, don't they? Jesus, even Jared can see the goosebumps on her skin. This time, he gives her the little reassuring squeeze. "We're nearly there. That door's gotta open. One of them has to open."

He hopes.

Once they get to the door, Jared lets go of her hand when he reaches for the knob, partially because he's expecting to need both hands to get the damn thing open, but the knob turns easily and he pushes it open with a creepy creak. Jared reaches back for Sharra again so that they don't end up getting separated before they can both get out of this room. If it's dangerous when they're there to help one another, he doesn't want to think about what would happen if one of them was trapped in here alone and that sprinkler system turned back on... "Come on, we'll just keep looking for another door," he assures her as they move into the hallway again. "...maybe we can find osme dry clothes somewhere."

"I'll stay close to you," Sansa decides. She is quite cold, actually, and she presses up against his back as much as she can. It doesn't help much with the cold but she wants to try and warm herself as much as she can. The only time she's ever been this cold had been when she'd crossed an icy river trying to escape from Ramsay in the midst of winter; this is similar, with her brief clothing and wet skin.

"Thank you for not leaving me, Jared. It means quite a bit and I do not forget a kindness. It's not how we do things in the North." The North Remembers, after all, and Sansa is nothing if not the embodiment of that. She has survived other horrors in her life. She will survive this, for good or ill, and she will be grateful for those who help her along the way.

The air chills her drying skin again and she buries her face against Jared's neck in a futile attempt to warm herself. "Jared, I'm sorry. I'm so cold that I'll be of little use very soon. We have to find something dry to wear or a fire so I can warm myself. I don't know that I'll warm up otherwise."

It surprises him a little to feel Sharra up against his back, but he can't say he's going to complain about it. In spite of the fact that she's soaked to the bone, too, her body feels warm against his and that's admittedly kind of nice. "I think we're even, all things considering," he points out. "You could've left me back there, too."

If she had, he might not have made it out of here alive, but she didn't. She helped untangle him from the vines, even though she felt uncomfortable doing it. He's grateful, he's just never been very good at gratitude.

"You're gonna be okay," he assures her as they move into the hall and he looks around to see if he can find any way to get back into the dining room where he left the suit jacket. She could take the top of her dress down and cover herself with the jacket, to warm her core. "We'll figure something out."

He moves a little to drape an arm around her shoulders, moving her to his side. "If we don't find something in a few minutes, we'll stop and see if we can figure something else out. Tear down some curtains to wrap you in or something."

Sansa feels warmer when he puts his arm around her and she thinks at least this will keep her from getting any colder. She doesn't think she's in danger of freezing to death; she's not wet in the snow, after all, and she's Queen of Winter. Cold will not defeat her. Cold is her friend, her ally, something she's familiar with. She can defeat this if they could defeat the vines.

She swallows a bit and she tries to speak without her teeth chattering - that would shatter the illusion that she's in control of herself. "Curtains would be easy enough to come by, I think, and provided I got the wet clothing off I would warm up quickly enough. It's my wet hair and this wet dress that's keeping me from getting warmer. Damned material won't dry fast enough."

It's not like her to curse but it's necessary, in this instance, and she hopes Jared isn't the sort to be easily offended. She keeps moving through the hall and searching for a door. Any door will do, she thinks, and she hopes nothing lurks behind it worse than the glass gardens they'd been trapped in. When she spots a likely door, she calls out to him.

"There's a door. Should we try it?"

Taking a deep breath and sighing a little, Jared looks around. "Yeah, the only problem with that plan is that I haven't seen any windows and without windows, there's no reason for drapes. There's got to be some around here somewhere, I just didn't notice any between the dining room and that plant room."

He's still weighing the pros and cons of looking anywhere that they haven't already been when Sharra asks whether they ought to try the door she's found. He lifts an eyebrow. Should they? It feels like a loaded question after what they just went through.

For a moment, Jared doesn't answer. Instead, he looks back at the door and hesitates. "It could be worse than the plants," he points out. "...or it could be our ticket out." Jared doesn't like this feeling; he's never unsure of himself where other people can see. He keeps that shit to himself. "Yeah. How much worse than that could it possibly be?"

"There's nothing to do but try. We survived the last room, anyway, so I have faith that whatever this room does cannot be worse. We at least have the ability to work well together and I...I've some experience with things like this."

Her horrors had been in her own home, though, and they'd been visited upon her by a person and not the rooms themselves. It's somewhat different, yes, but Sansa thinks it's made her strong enough to survive whatever this place plans to throw at her. Besides - she's fought the dead. That's no small thing.

"Come, let's try it and stop dreading the unknown."

Honestly, he's terrified. Jared has never been more scared in his life than he has been since waking up in that fucking dining room. He has no idea what's behind that door and whether it's another death trap or an escape route. Sharra, on the other hand, seems sure enough of herself that he finds himself bending to it.

Taking a deep breath, Jared shakes his head a little as he shrugs. He can barely believe he's going along with this, but what other choice does he have? Wander around in hallways and never try a door because he's scared? That'll get him big, fat, fucking nowhere.

"All right, here goes nothing..."

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