multiversallogs | though i'm past one hundred thousand miles, i'm feeling very still

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though i'm past one hundred thousand miles, i'm feeling very still

Who: Benji Ryans and Bruce Wayne
What: Lest the gods get mad, Benji goes looking for the intended recipient of a swap meet item.
Where: Bruce's brain.
When: An evening not far after the event.
Warnings: TBA.

The room lended to her by Njoki is a small space, but in a comfortable kind of way; shadows that stretch any longer seem deceitful, hiding empty space and thus reducing it. There's still enough light coming in by the window by the time Benji shuts off the lamp and picks her way to bed, tired enough that maybe sleep won't be a struggle.

And the only reason it might have been otherwise is that she's set aside the blockers that the doctor had prescribed her, just for this evening. The fear that she might not have control by the time she shuts her eyes is a very real one, once more dragging the unwilling into her own nightmares in a singularly horrific invasion of privacy she still cringes at in memory. There is, also, always the chance that whoever it is sees she's seeking might not keep these hours, but then, she'll just have to try again. She lies in the dark for a good half an hour, the device set to rest against her chest, fingertips placed against it with the lightness of a resting spider.

She isn't sure that would help. It's not an exact science.

It's set aside again when she feels tired enough, and it's some time later that she finally does succumb to unconsciousness, her will flowing like a psychic current in search.

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Day and night after day and night - he may be a nocturnal creature by necessity, but every so often and always purely by chance, Bruce ends up having to sleep for twenty hours straight and accidentally ends up with a normal human schedule. Briefly.

When Benji goes under, he's already been asleep for hours, long into his exhausted unconscious bender. He'll still wake at the slightest change in tension in his room if necessary, but for now, his system is clinging to oblivion and the rest he so rarely gives himself.

Dreamland tonight is a soft-gloved type of torment, subtle in its cruelty (but Bruce Wayne's subconscious doesn't know how to be kind). Crisp, frozen air, fresh dirt, the smell of pleasantly controlled burning wood somewhere in the distance. Bright white, dark green edges - where the earth ends and sky begins is difficult to make out, except for the sketched edges of rock and tree that dot the snow-covered world like scattered ash.

Scents always come back to him first. It's what he tries to linger in, when his mind returns him to the ceiling of the world; Tibet's frozen mountains, almost terrifying in their beauty, cold, with thin air and strange winter-growing plants, are weighted in a way no post card will ever capture.

Somewhere in the snow, a student sits, and waits.

This place is cold. Cold in a way that seems pure and crystallised and clean as opposed to the rains churning the ground into mud and ice, the sludgy way the rivers began to run, the storms. Those are the winters that Benji knows better, but it doesn't stop her from adapting when her shape cuts a place into the imagined, remembered world; silvery fox fur rugs around her shoulders, wool lining boots that crunch through the snow that cracks underfoot like hardened sugar and sinks wetter beneath.

She spends a moment to be relieved when awareness erases out the dream-land fuzziness of her perception, bringing everything into sharp and lucid focus, as opposed to incoherent immersion. This dream itself feels very large, and she in turn feels very small. And cold. Tempting to give up on human shape and explore the reaches of Tibet that memory allows in some sort of formless deity that can feel the texture of mountains like fingers running over cloth, having seen nothing quite like this, but she would probably stay too long if she didn't try to focus.

Moving for the centre of the dream, the shadows she casts running over ice and tree and rock as thick as silk as she crunches closer for the waiting figure.

The cold is different than normal cold. It's the kind of cold that kills men like sighing, that cleanses without effort - this high up, barely anything can survive. Gangkhar Puensum is truly wild, in ways most of the earth save the deeps of her oceans aren't. Bruce Wayne doesn't believe in holiness, but if he did, this place would be sacred.

In the center of his consciousness there is a ledge (there always is), and this time it's outstretched ice, a bridge that fades into nothingness over a snow-covered valley. It's unreal, nothing that could exist outside a dream, crystal-spun and delicate and casting a perspective that humans would never manage to take in with their own lacking eyes. At the end sits a figure dressed in black and brown, clothing a mixture of timeless tradition and modern bits to save time or comfort.

He doesn't seem to be doing anything.

The presence of the bridge is enough to make her dizzy, never mind actually standing upon it. Most less-than-real additions tend to do so, an irritation or a flaw, but with the man she is looking for seated so precariously upon it, she isn't going to risk redesigning the world to suit her comfort, and she tries not to do so anyway unless it is a necessity. Benji does not have to shuffle the span of it, at least; she simply is closer than she was before, and it's definitely more the power of belief than the fur and wool she's dressed in that saves her from the killing cold.

She thinks that this might not be such a bad place to go, sometimes. Freezing preservation for the soul, with the cold oppressive enough to sear icy into your lungs at each inhale, and stop you from feeling much of anything else. She can't guess as to the motivations of others, though.

Rather than approach him directly, Benji arrives at the edge at some distance away, settling to kneel and place bare hands against the ice edge. She leans, just a little, to peer down at the snowy natural waste below, almost precarious, and brave by some standards. "This place," she says, her voice sounding thin in the already thin air, "it's amazing." In a moment, she'll recognise him too, but the dreamed up representation of his profile is not yet studied too closely. There's a lot to look at.

At first, he's not sure what's approaching - he knows because this is his realm (lucid as always) versus his flesh-and-blood senses - a ghost from his past, a nightmare, but -

Ah.

"Sometimes."

The scenery doesn't change, but there's an impression, like a fleeting, repressed memory, of something burning. Just for a heartbeat.

Bruce glances over his shoulder, though he doesn't fully turn around or even look at his visitor properly - bare acknowledgment, still taking in the scenery in his head.

"Oneironaut?" What are you here for, stranger?

That sense of fire is fleeting and Benji isn't about to explore it much further for all that it has her looking up, wary as prey to any shift and change. She settles back where she kneels, pulling fur around herself tighter before looking now towards the dreamer and-- opens her mouth, shuts it again. Decides it might be rude or arrogant to comment on the man's apparent lucidity, and says instead, "I've never been called that before."

But it's not untrue.

"I came to look for you-- at least, I think I'm in the right place." A pause, and then, impulsively, on the back of recognition; "You jumped off the edge."

Bruce - Tom - is no psychic, no sorcerer, his only familiarity with these proceedings being involuntary experience; sense-memory, paranoia. He doesn't feel deliberately threatened by this woman, and so he doesn't appear to be on edge, or defensive. (Appearances are deceiving.)

"Were you worried?"

He doesn't sound like he believes she was. It's obvious he suspects some other motivation, though what it is, he can only guess at. That she's the being who caused that uncanny apocalyptic dream some weeks prior is something he puts together and accepts easily, at her assertion.

She kind of just-- makes an uncertain sound at that. Was she concerned for his physical health? No. Should she worry about people who jump off buildings? Maybe, but each to his own. "No," she decides on, a little like admission, before she tucks a hand into the pocket of her fur wrap. Again, she just sort of folds space around her so she is now positioned a little closer, more of a conversational distance.

This kind of easy lucidity is not wholly unfamiliar. It reminds her of the students of a telepath, who had helped teach them to guard their minds, to be aware of invaders. It, at least, makes conversation a little easier.

"I received something," she says, and takes out the little device in one hand, the charger in the other, easily recalled from recent memory, and any details she missed, well, she is here to see if the stranger whose mind she's currently in can make it realer, triggered into conjuration. "Is this yours?"

There's a ripple of something like tension as she moves and by the time she's finished her question, Bruce is several meters away and facing her, standing, the space beneath their feet no longer ice but wood, the terrace of a monastery, now huddled into a shadow of the great landscape they were floating among just before. The transition is surreal and disorienting to re-adjust to, though the move itself is as immediate and responsive as a fighter slipping out of a hold or a wolf under a fence; the first hint that she might be visiting a wild animal instead of a man.

As for Bruce himself, his expression is unchanged. Unreadable. He looks at the device from where he is. The model, the wear and tear, the nicks on the keys, the tiny silver embossed sticker on the back.

"Yes," he answers, because it's not like he's going to say, No, but it looks like my co-CEO's.

The change is a natural one, as dreams can be mercurial like this, but every reposition is felt, noted, makes her tense in turn, both disorienting as well as instilling in her the natural instinct to stabilise the world back to where it was, but manages, this time, not to do so. Her wardrobe doesn't change to suit-- because it's still really, really cold-- but her expression goes a little neutral, alert, and after a second, she rises to her feet. Awkwardly gripping, still, charger and machine, and she absently wraps the wire around the former.

Her movements are a little slower and she doesn't approach, this time, sort of how you don't approach dogs unaccustomed to friendly people. Head ducked, briefly, lank locks of brunette-black curtaining into her eyes, before its swept away again with a twitch of her head. "You weren't at the party," she continues on, although even in dream avatar, there is that note of optimistic intention. It's an obvious thing to say, but serves as explanation, maybe.

A glance, now, to where they happen to be, a relocation but one that isn't far. Unnatural, in the same fleeting impression of fire and smoke from before, there's a glimmering impression of spring time, the kind that comes with humid continental climates. It's rain and grass and procreating flora, and sun that glimmers of water into of the white blanket of snow.

"That other place was an accident. I've been apologising to more people than just you. Sorry," is added, realising she hasn't actually formerly said so.

He slept with a talisman to keep people out of his dreams for a while after that other place, dealing with the headaches (the most minor of inconveniences), but ultimately deciding to let it be. He's of two minds, now - on the one hand this intrusion is something he can't abide by, this woman already knows too much about him, but on the other, he doesn't think she'd have found him any other way.

Silence for a while as he watches her, following a slight movement that he quells - awkwardly. Whatever dangerous affinity he might have for controlling his own head awake or asleep, he is no dreamwalker, and the fact that he almost extended his hand to take the phone from her highlights it easily.

"What's your CiD number?"

There's a brief smile, one that cannot be helped but is perhaps intended to reassure, at the slight twitch of movement that might otherwise be imperceptible if her focus was not on him and they were not here. In the same moment, the PDA and charger are gone from her hands, as if she hadn't held them at all.

Ordinarily, at the question, she would probably stare blankly at him and then fumble around for her CiD to answer that question. Here, it's much easier to think and remember, although this doesn't have her reciting it. It seems simpler just to have the scrawled set of digits, a note she'd given to someone else or perhaps an accessible reminder for herself planted amongst her belongings, appear in Bruce's hand. It's no bamf of magical conjuring, just slid into reality, like dodgy editing.

She's closer to the edge of the terrace than she was a moment ago, peering over the edge, and the sound of water-- much water, rivers of it-- is a low hiss at the edges of hearing, becoming louder. Beneath the terrace and streaming down the side of icy mountain, sweeping snow with it in white and black as if this portion of mountainside were melting away. The building, and all else around it, appears stable enough, despite a watery mist choking the previously dry air just beneath them. It's a waterfall, one from myth, but its real life counterpart, one of the many in the wilds of New York, has a few mythic names attached to it as well.

"What is it like here in the summer?" she asks. "Is it the same?"

For a heartbeat's worth of time he looks wry, accepting having been busted on that real-world impulse. Somewhere in there is a sense of humor.

Before answering, he looks at the slip of paper and commits the number to memory with ease; it might seem like a feat to remember something like that out of a dream, but for him it's fine - or at least, he seems to think it'll be fine. Some people find this man impressive, some people find him insufferably cocky. Benji's free to make her own call.

"This high up?" Somewhere in the well of his voice, dry from the cold, there's that wry humor again. "It's never warm."

Fondness, too.

It's a suspended judgement. But being capable isn't a bad thing, she thinks.

"No," she agrees, tilting a look up off the landscape, the waterfall she's introduced, to glance up at the clear dome of the sky. It's interesting to be in the one place on Earth, or an Earth, that reaches closest to it. The watermist kicked up into the air tends to freeze and glitter, basic science mingling between memories just to be briefly fabulous before disappearing swiftly into the vastness of the mountain slope. "But isn't it a wonderful excuse to wear fur all year round?"

She pushes herself back from the terrace edge, never really unbundling her arms from around herself since present the god given gift intended for the stranger. "What can I call you?"

"Tom." He has to assert it, lest his subconscious corrects him - helpfully, he's been going by that alias for so long now that it feels normal. So normal that the sense of foreboding, lurking horror that tends to accompany Bruce's dreams has politely kept its distance. For now.

"Do you not like being in peoples heads unadulterated?" The waterfall. Nearer to her now, walking along the edge of the terrace, Bruce extends one hand, gentlemanly. There's a slim, anxiety-inducing stairway carved half in wood and rock that goes higher, to one side.

"No--"

The English language and her tone both conspire to make that not a confirmation that she doesn't like it, but no, not necessarily. She is briefly hesitant, but distracted from worrying about being assumptive by looking towards the staircase and wondering how much higher one can climb out here without touching on world records. At least in this way, there will be no shortage of new things to see--

But he introduced himself, and there's no question with whether he's lying or not, she assumes he isn't, and he may as well not be, and so she remembers to say; "Benji," before accepting the hand out. It's been about a decade and a half since she's bothered to feel conscious of her name.

"Benji." It's not a double-take at her name, but an affirmation via the rusted habit of old-fashioned manners, the same that prompts him to lead her up the nightmarishly unsafe stairs. (Nightmare being the key word; they need to keep moving for a reason. His head isn't a safe space.) The waterfall looks lovely from a higher vantage point, without a roof over them.

He's sturdy but distant, in that way where dreams offer more sensory input than the real waking world. Once they're up and out, he closes a wooden hatch behind them with one foot, slamming the monastery away. Though there's nothing to see or hear, a sense settles over them like they're being watched. Tom doesn't remark on it.

"I suppose I'll be seeing you."

That feeling of impending doom is sort of a shadow beneath the water, and a lot of people have shadows, some more dangerous than others. She doesn't know the make of Tom's, but it would be very bad manners to assert herself enough to find out, she thinks, for all that she is, as ever, nosily curious. She follows, she admires the view with the obvious open-eyed awe of someone who just-- hasn't seen anything like this place before, she treads as carefully as she can without being too slow, as if lingering on the steps would enable something to toss her from them.

"Yes," she says, simply. She is not concerned that she lacks his number; he has hers and when it comes to dreaming, she can always find her way back where she's wandered. "On the other side.

"Sleep well," she adds, and she's fading then, as if she were a light trick, a hallucination, layers of colours and outline blinked away.

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though i'm past one hundred thousand miles, i'm feeling very still

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