multiversallogs | [ closed ] teeth of mangled little listeners

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[ closed ] teeth of mangled little listeners

Who: Benji and Wolfgang
What: This dream is contaminated.
Where: Dreamscape
When: Nighttime, sometime late Ceidary
Warnings: Severe body horror, violence directed at children, will be edited as needed

The desert at night is comfortably cool. This far from any major city, it is also not as dark as it feels like it should be, because the moon and the stars are out in such bright clarity that they light up the whole landscape. Of course, it's hard to tell exactly whether there is any major city anywhere at all — there's nothing around as far as the eye can see but more desert. This could be anytime at all.

It's the convoy of trucks rolling in that telegraph the time period — they all look roughly circa the 1940's. They're all black with black-tinted windows except for the single silver Cadillac with them. The glare from their headlights is visible a long way off in the distance and for an indeterminate amount of time, that's all there is — headlights coming closer, illuminating small patches of desert before them. Why they stop where they do is anyone's guess, but they do stop and the doors of all those cars open, people spilling out — white men and women in suits that are at least weather-appropriate; it's about 15°C. What they're saying, in spite of the distance, is more or less audible. They're mostly British.

"Are you sure this is where she is?"

"Absolutely certain; the readings are off the charts."

They're carrying weird gadgets, almost comically so, like something out of a 40's pulp science fiction comic, almost as if they were scavenged out of materials found in someone's garage, all buttons and dials and long antennae. The cartoonish deedly-boop noises they make are enough at odds with the general tone of the rest of this scene to edge it towards surreality, but the deadly economy in the faces of the men and women wielding them swing everything back around to menacing.

This could be a child's reimagining of technology they do not understand.

They're spreading out in grid-like patterns, combing the area for something, obviously searching. A woman stops to open the trunk of the silver Cadillac and remove a case, inside of which is something that is not at all cartoonish or funny — a modern assault rifle, like the LSAT assault rifle. She's loading it when one of her colleagues glances over and scoffs.

"You're really going to use a gun?" he asks.

"Shut up, you idiot. It's Primium." She locks the magazine into the weapon and wields it like it weighs nothing at all.

"Christ. Is this really necessary? It's just a kid."

Above them, the stars shine on indifferently, but something is wrong with the constellations. None of them are recognisable, and they should be here, because this is Earth. None of the men and women searching the desert pay that any mind; they have something more important to do than pay attention to the exact configuration of stars.

Behind a dune thirteen meters away, something moves. Something that sounds human.

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There was a trick her aunt showed her once. A trick in the correct sense of the word, something a magician might do. She'd called the birds from the sky, and they'd flocked down in a mass of flapping wings, feathers coming loose in the fury, startlingly loud, and by the time they lifted, she was gone. Benji had been young when she'd seen that (and young, too, when Eileen had been killed some time later), and willingly to believe that she really had been carried away by the birds, perhaps in pieces.

These birds are black, catching blue in the light, and seem to take pieces of Benji as the world turns to pieces as well. She goes tumbling as the great ridges in the earth curve downwards, pulling her towards it centre, and with a sound that is like tearing fabric, the surge of flapping avian bodies-- rooks, in this case, not very American but neither was Eileen-- burst into the air and leave nothing behind. They flock in a panic, spiralling, calling to one another in higher, thinner notes than their more famous, American counterparts. If given a chance, the tighter their coil, the more claws and beaks snag at feathers, and by the time one bird has tumbled, bleeding, the world is falling away.

And then there's nothing, as the land gently crumbles to reveal the vastness it was masking.

The birds are gone, too, which is good, or else perhaps the shape may have followed them here. Abstraction is not unfamiliar to Benji, but right now--

Blackness glimmers, ripples, across a flat plane of space that Benji has deduced to be horizontal, at least from her immediate, mysterious vantage point. What glides lazily across it is an old trawler, not large for its kind, a dated recreational boat that she knows well enough for it to be an easy thing to summon, as simple as remembering. They are boats built for endurance, for roaming destinations, and possibly not the High Umbra, but it seems to be faring well for exactly the same reason that Benji is breathing and corporeal.

She lies on her back on the foredeck, getting her bearings. She isn't sure if the danger has passed, but it's certainly a lot more peaceful, and she is aiming for peace. Dressed ridiculously, also, in a black gown with feathered trim, as if taking a cue from the rooks she'd ridden, her avatar as ever severe in her glamour. Reluctantly, she sits up, pulling herself up to stand.

"Are you alright?" she asks the ether, managing to not sound shaken. She is on edge, waiting for something to go wrong again.

Something will go wrong again. He knows this, thinks it tiredly. There's too many things around them for any of this to be safe, he can already see a hundred ways where the dream might crumple in on itself, turn into something that is horrifying less because of its absurdity — it's in the nature of dreams to be absurd — than because of the way it feels like an intruder. Like the only real thing here.

The great sparkling figure that is simultaneously just behind the ship but also miles and miles away — the figure that is vaguely fish-shaped, but massive, the size of an aircraft carrier — that, for instance, would be easy to give teeth. For now, it's just drifting by, but he's waiting every time he sees anything with any form, breath held. There are nightmares here worse than he could summon in any physical plane.

It's a long time before there's any answer for that reason. He doesn't want to start something and have to flee in the middle of it. When he finally actually appears — and it is him, not a him from another life, the only connection that colourless echo and a certain sadness in the eyes — it's far away, separated by an entire not-ocean which appears to be composed of velvety nothingness and teeming with littler starfish (actual stars, actual fish), but space is so meaningless here, he might as well be a foot away.

He's four. Maybe younger. It's not the form he remembers most clearly or feels safest in, it's just the first one that comes to mind. Sitting on an island he made for himself out of more nothing, knees up to his chest, arms wrapped around them, impossibly small compared to the vastness of the astral reaches. "I told you to go away," he says with an adult's voice. What he means is warned you.

These things tend to happen in threes; maybe this is the last one.

She hears fine, sees fine, even if he is but a pinprick in the distance. It hardly matters. Her hands find the railing of her vessel as she looks towards the island, her expression almost steely. Though she seems almost entirely composed of black and white, blue eyes are vibrant, electric. Despite the age of the boy, she recognises who it is, especially as that voice rings out.

"I know," Benji says. "What I asked was, 'are you alright?'"

If she sounds fussy, it is because she is ruffled; she does not, however, sound particularly irritated, just a little resigned towards possibly not being liked. Dreamwalkers, unsurprisingly, get met with a wide array of reaction, and rarely is it positive. The large, drifting objects are respected, ignored, and she casually tries to widen the space between them and herself, even if the boat seems only to move at a lazy crawl through the inky darkness. She wants to think the nothingness-- or whatever this place is-- that surrounds her will protect them, but...

She taps black painted nails against the railing. Here, she doesn't have any biting habits, and they are nice and long, sometimes sharp. "Come with me," she invites, then. "We can go somewhere else."

"No," he says, voice collapsing into childhood. He's afraid to go anywhere else, somewhere he might not know, somewhere he doesn't think of as safe. It's perfectly irrational because no place he can imagine is really safe from this, not even where he went the last time.

(He suspects Benji does not want to visit the Mariana Trench. Anyway, that's not safer, it's just you can't see anything.)

But they can't stay here, not when everything here already has that slightly unnerving quality anything not-quite-real always has. Everything here threatens to fall apart from disbelief, which would open cracks in the nothing-space to the kind of void that drives mortal minds mad. He buries his small face in his arms, already losing his grip on the form of this landscape. Whether they go where Benji has in mind or where his subconscious takes them, the difference is going to be the degree of danger, not whether it's present.

His spirit, even less of a figure here than it is in the material world, is standing next to him, tugging on his sleeve, whispering in his ear, trying to get him to move. This is the first time he's been smaller than she is.

Dreams fall apart very easily, because all it can take is a change of thought. Usually, Benji can stabilise them, focus them. In this case, the sheer depth of the place intimidates her, and she does not want to wait for what's coming. Reality frays at the edges, and there is some other alien memory, folding up this one into a smaller scale; a moment of safety, a young, vaguely masculine woman that Wolfgang will not recognise briefly embracing him, a hand at his forehead and lifting hair out of the way, a canopy of trees above her head, although there's no pain, because Benji doesn't quite remember the pain. A jolt of home sickness is shared, before Benji shoves it aside.

Running.

Wolfgang is more riding his own actions, and it's less about feeling as though he is no longer in control of his own body so much as willingly following a script, and so far, he must run. Loose forest dirt and dead leaves skitter and slide beneath his feet, staggering out onto the dirt track as the truck begins to pull away. Klaxons in the distance ring almost like tinnitus, and the shape, it's beyond the shade of the trees, but maybe not for long.

The truck is already moving, because they have to get away now. If it picks up more speed, he'll miss it. But no; a leap, a hand snagging out, someone inside reaching to grab the back of his jacket and gracelessly wrench him inside, tumbling, sprawling.

"We'll be out of range, soon."

Sure, the radius on the hunterbots is not relevant to the shape that haunts Wolfgang's dreams, but belief is a powerthing, and these are Benji's rules. The script falls away from Wolfgang's actions, and the back of the truck is emptier, suddenly, save for the shadowy memory that drives it through the foresty terrain, and Benji. She is, maybe, a little younger, but not much; a BDU jacket swamps her narrow torso, and she presents differently; hair cut shorter, a lighter shade of whiskers shading her jaw and throat. Night is falling fast, too, blending the scenery with shadows as opposed to the high noon of just prior. The klaxons have gone.

She offers her hands, to help Wolfgang up a little, enough to at least kneel or sit.

The people he is in his dreams — the people he used to be — tend to come from wildly disparate backgrounds. There are certain trends, like they tend to be young — very young, six or eight or ten years old — and they tend to be girls, but that's not a solid rule; there have been boys, there have been adult women, there have been people who don't fall on either side of the binary. They've been wealthy and poor, from families both functional and dysfunctional. They've come from every part of the planet.

The one thing they have in common is this: they die.

Fear and running, that's familiar. Feeling as if he's being chased by something, because he usually is. He waits for it, the gunshot, the knife in the back, the too-sharp teeth in his neck. It never comes. He's being lifted instead, which is easier than it should be, he's so small. He sits up, using her proffered hands, his knees pulled back up like he doesn't want to disturb anything around him by existing.

He looks confused. Rescue is not part of the narrative.

The foreignness of it is not enough to rock him into lucidity, but it comes close. This feels like being complimented in a language he doesn't speak, like accepting an award with someone else's name on it. Or like showing up late to your surprise birthday party. He doesn't know what to do with these feelings, but the severity of them is frightening. "Where is this?" It's in Hebrew, but understood nonetheless.

"The Huds-- mm, America. Heading north up the Hudson Valley, until we go west," Benji says, in English, but as stated, it matters little even if Wolfgang did not know it. Her hands retract once Wolfgang is situated, but hover in brief uncertainty, mostly because she herself is not certain, not of his response or whether he'll be glad for the change. He had, after all, told her 'no'. But sometimes she just does things. On hands and knees, she shifts to sit beside him, close without invading space, resting her back against the metal and wood that seals them in.

Her arms fold around her. "Or just away, whichever you prefer. Safe and swiftly moving; I think migration is best, sometimes." Her long legs stretch out in front of her, and she is once again dressed a little differently, changing appearance as her own mind settles; she resembles more herself in Baedal, in soft wools and cottons of black and grey, boots at a tapered point.

Every now and then, the truck jumps a little beneath them as its wheels bump and dip. The narrative of his dreams are frightening, and she wonders if it is this new story that has him looking more like a deer in the headlights than usual.

"You're the only person I know who's hard to find in their own head," she accuses, without a trace of severity, the corner of her mouth turning up.

"I've been a lot of other people," he says, absently. What they have in common in the Dreaming is that they're marked by the visual presence of his Avatar, but he's like that in the waking world, too — three facets at once: seeming, self, and spirit — it's just not visible.

His eyes move towards the back of the truck where it opens. He's watching the scenery roll behind them. He doesn't recognise it, of course; he's never been on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. Filtered through the lens of his Avatar, it warps slightly, attaining qualities he recognises as the Desert of Judah, but only a little of it — it looks like someone blended the two landscapes together in parts. A buckthorn pushes its way out of the ground and blooms explosively, from seed to shrub in maybe thirty seconds. He closes his eyes to stop looking at it, but it doesn't help; it's still there through his eyelids.

He looks ten-ish. When that happened is anyone's guess. It's better to grow up than down, at least; talking to a toddler with an adult's voice is probably uncomfortable.

"It's going to come back." He knows that saying it makes it doubly true, but not saying it won't make it stop, either. It's not like he can really control his subconscious, and still, there are other things he doesn't want people to know about what is lurking in his head.

It would be nice if Benji could say that she could help, but-- she really isn't sure. Entering the minds of other SLC-expressive individuals tends to present new challenges if they have certain mental gifts, or strong subconsciouses and their vicious memories can do all kinds of damage, but never do they occur on a level that Benji would consider supernatural. In that area, she isn't sure what she can do. She sits quietly, peering down at the younger shape of the man she's gotten to know, then towards where she can see the landscape rolling by.

"Would you like to wake up?" she offers. "You could-- I mean, if you wanted to talk about it, I don't mind. Somewhere easier." As in, the kitchen of their shared house probably won't suddenly break up into pieces. Boneless arms won't slither from the walls. "Even if I can't help."

She sort of expects he will turn down the not-help, and isn't certain if it's her place to breeze by it or accept it, or what she will do if presented with that choice.

Waking up is a band-aid on a bigger problem. It will be waiting for him when he returns, and he knows he will; all he does is sleep.

But reality tempers what he can create through imagination, even in Baedal, where consensual reality is less rigid. The things he thinks about don't usually come to life.

"Yes," he says.

And sometimes it can make the dreaming worse, or it did in Benji's experience, back when her ability first manifested and she didn't know what she was doing. But for now--

For now, she smiles, small, and looks away. Waking is sudden, as it usually is with her. Not alarming, exactly, just immediate. Wolfgang was sitting in the bed of a truck, and now he is in his own usual one, still groggy, still tired, as uneventful a transition as any push into wakefulness. If it's morning, it's still early enough for it to be dark, the air cool and quiet and shadowy.

It's not very long after that he'll hear the sound of someone else moving through the hallway of the second floor, headed downstairs. It's sort of a super implicit invitation, but the kind that Wolfgang can ignore politely; Benji is making tea for herself regardless as to what company does or does not join her.

It's a ritual.

His room looks different. It would be better if it were messier, like he was throwing things around in his sleep. Instead, it's tidy, like someone came in and picked everything up and put it back where it belonged — but several inches off, just slightly moved. The difference is not drastic. He notices enough to know it's off, but not enough to be sure. It takes a special kind of dysfunction to gaslight yourself.

The sound of his footsteps on the stairs, then the back screen door opening and banging closed. The kids are asleep in the backyard now that the sky jellyfish are gone, and he's not making any sound. If he's hysterical or crying or puking, he's keeping it to himself. He just needs a few moments alone.

Footsteps again upstairs, a pause, then downstairs again. When he appears in the kitchen, he's thrown on a robe. It doesn't fit him well, he's drowning in it. His feet are bare and his hair sticks out in every direction, a giant fluffy white mass on his head, making him look a bit like a lion. The dark circles around his eyes are normal.

Benji is seated at the table, her head rested against her hand and eyes almost shut as she-- thinks, and half-dozes. A sweater has been pulled over her sleep clothes, feet bare, trousers slightly too long, and her other hand grips a hold of the cup of tea she's working on and halfway through by the time Wolfgang has made it this way. At the sound of approach, she lifts her head, a brief flicker of open worry as well as some guilt in her expression, before managing to seal it up again.

"Good morning. Um." Both hands move, gesturing in a tada offer towards where a ceramic teapot rests on stone, containing a tea of rooibos and other fragrant additions.

"Hi." He hesitates in the threshold for some time, looking like he might turn and bolt like a startled deer.

But then he moves, shuffling in, and sits down on a chair. Wolfgang pulls his legs up to his chest, feet balanced on the edge of the seat, the same posture his dream-self had, but this isn't new, either. He never just sits down like a normal person.

He rubs at his face like he can wipe the sleepiness away. "Sorry," he says, which... yes, that's how he's going to begin.

Benji makes a sound, partially muffled by the fact she's taking a sip of tea. Her first urge is to dismiss it, but then she-- honestly isn't sure, and so feels moved to ask; "For?"

So this nice; they are both half-asleep. She's managed to finger-comb her hair into submission, eyes droopy enough while perfectly awake at the best of times, but at least she can focus, and this she does. A sympathetic anxiety is also kept leashed, although it will probably creep into her tone when she speaks.

Apologising is a habit, a bad one, but that doesn't make it less sincere. It comes from kind of a fucked up place where he actually feels as if he's always doing everything wrong. He still has to pause to think about what, exactly, he's apologising for.

Wolfgang gestures at his head. "For... that." Being disturbing, not containing it well — he's apologising for it having happened, for not having thought ahead and remembered that she has these powers and he has recurring nightmares. He feels inconsiderate, like he should have remembered and done something proactive about it, and guilty because it's his fear of his magic and what it could do to his mind that's kept him from doing so.

It's very hard to convey that much in two spoken words, and his tone is shaky, bordering frustrated that he can't say all that out loud. This is difficult to process on top of the residual feelings he has from the narrative of that dream. He picks at the grooves in the wood of the table with his nails. "I should have done something about it," he ventures, finally.

She feels a little bad for asking, when he starts struggling with an answer, but doesn't dismiss or interrupt it. She drinks tea, instead, and listens. She is quiet even afterwards, drawn back to the memory, of all things slithering to the centre, breaking in order to do so. But whatever calming down she might have needed, she got it out of the way while Wolfgang came down, and draws her mind from it now. "You kept telling me to leave," she reminds, or-- informs. Benji remembers dreams like people remember normal waking moments, but not everyone does, so she doesn't assume.

"Which was nice of you, but rest assured, I don't blame you for me being obtuse." Another sip of tea, one of those fidgets she does to stop herself from talking more. "What might you have done about it?"

Wolfgang typically remembers every detail of every second, but he suspects that is due to repetition. He has one of the same set of dreams every night, and they're not even proper dreams so much as memories, which are never really forgotten. This one is different because of that. A lot of it is blurry, and he's losing it; he should be grateful for that.

"Blocked my head off. Something." He leans forward, bracing his elbows on the table, his hands running through his hair and getting stuck in the tangled mass it is. He makes a face and pulls them out. "Put a big wall around it. That's not real," he adds, barely pausing between that subject change. "I mean, I think it's not. I don't think it's dangerous."

He doesn't think...

"Oh."

There's not the sort of answer she was hoping for, but it was the one she is coming to expect. Her mouth press into a line, neither wishing to agree with that sentiment nor wanting to argue, tipping a look into her tea before bringing it up to sip. Then, she sets it down, with a more definite click. "I'm sorry, too, for prying. You don't have to block me out. I'm going to go back to sleep soon and wake up again and remember I had a particularly frightening dreamwalk, no harm done."

More or less. She drags her attention back up. "But what are you going to do for it? I mean, it was so terrible."

The look Wolfgang gives her there is a bit bleary and confused, as if the idea of doing something about it has never occurred to him. But then, what is there to do?

He shrugs, frowning back down at the grooves in the table. "Just... deal. I guess." He fidgets suddenly, tugging on his hair, chewing on his nails, stopping only when he gets a flake of nail varnish in his mouth. "It's not real, is it?"

It comes from a real place — real memories of real events — but the dream itself is just a recollection; when he wakes up, it ends, and his body is fine. When he says it, though — it's not real — he sounds uncertain, as if the distinction doesn't occur to him naturally. It's not supposed to count if it's all in your head. But if other people see it and experience it and are affected by it, does that not make it real?

He looks sort of miserable.

Fidget fidget. Her eyes track the fidgeting and, shyly, she goes to tip still somewhat warm tea into one of the mismatched cups she set out. She finds it at least gives her something to hold, and maybe that's true of everyone. It's set in front of him, before her hands retreat back into her own space. "It's funny, people sometimes ask me that," she says, not really looking at him as she speaks. "'Is it real', I mean. It's confusing to me. It's something that happens, like a-- like a disease, or." No, that's not very pleasant. She winces, tries again; "A feeling. A thought.

"I don't know what 'unreal' is supposed to be if it's something that happens. You've had dreams like that before. The..." Her forehead wrinkles, briefly, unsure what to call it, dream-like abstractions always harder to grapple with when she wakes up. "The shape," she says, finally, feeling a little silly for it.

Her blunt fingernails tap against the edge of her cup. "It was foreign, I think. We all have conflicts and nightmares, but it waged war on you. Or... I don't know. I guess not war." No more than storms are war on the sky, or black holes are war on space. She lifts her tea to sip, glancing at him over the top of it. "But it was exceedingly not nice."

"There was a..." He hesitates. 'Demon' is a little offensive, he thinks, there are people in this city who don't take kindly to it being used as a term to describe malevolent entities. (Which was really alarming to discover in the middle of a crowded bar in Ludmead, yes.) He makes a gesture, shaking one hand from side to side like sort of. "Thing. It was — Flag Hill, Aspic, Howl Barrow. Some other places. That was its shape, the spiral. That was real. It killed a lot of people, it was... pretty bad." He goes on to add, a little too quickly, "I mean, it's fine now, it's gone, I just... it's hard to forget."

And hard to talk about, given how his anxiety ramps up about 200%. That was a good answer, though. About things being real. "When I imagine things, sometimes, it makes them — it gives them power. Dreaming makes it stronger. It makes it hard to tell the difference between real and... not, dreaming and awake." He is staring straight at the tea. There's not a lot of eye contact going on in this conversation.

Her fingers link together, and she places her chin upon them as she listens, eyes hooded. She comes from place with a lot of rules, but Baedal has so many new ones. "I see. Maybe. Magic's still new." Because whatever she is, whatever her friends are, they weren't magical. Everyone has their own 'normal'. "But if it is just a memory, a dream-- you're very different," she interrupts herself to qualify, allowing a small smile obscures as she wearily rubs her face, "but maybe-- mm. There's a temple, the temple of Hanuel."

She feels a bit silly, talking about gods at all, but she's given it thought. Read about it. "One in Howl Barrow, I think. They could maybe help, if-- I'm not sure I can, the way it kept eating through. But we could both go, if you like."

"I can't." He looks rueful. He'd considered it, yeah, and felt guilty even for that much. "The whole, um... 'no other gods before me' thing is. Kind of a big deal." And he feels extra guilty over having participated in a couple god-run holidays here; there's nothing wrong with the pantheon, per se, just that he knows he's not supposed to, and yet.

"It's fine," he says after a moment, tugging on his hair. "I can handle it."

There's a bit of automatic argument lining up, but there's no conviction in it, and she let's it go before she can think of the words, falling silent for a moment in thought. If she can accept that magic is outside her grasp, so can she with religion. "Sorry," Benji says, instead, simply. "I know you can, though.

"But if you ever need to talk it through, I don't have to do it when asleep. And you, uh, know where to find me." Be less of a dork, Benji.

Edited (good writing) 2012-06-11 15:05 (UTC)

When Wolfgang smiles it is usually a reflexive action that takes him a few moments to catch up to, and then he gets embarrassed about it, pursing his lips to try to contain his expression back into neutrality or else covering his mouth, if his teeth are showing. He's doing that now. He's like this all the time, like he feels the need to apologise for everything he does — breathing, speaking, disturbing the air around him — and it's probably annoying when it's constant, but. "I think I can remember that, yes."

She smiles more freely, this time slightly abashed. She knows she is older than Wolfgang, by some years, and she only need look at him to know; and yet, sometimes she just doesn't feel that way at all. "Well, good," she allows, scratching long white fingers through her hair as she tips a look back down to her tea, before bringing it up to sip from, although not before adding; "Next time I'll set out wine instead of tea."

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[ closed ] teeth of mangled little listeners

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