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Who: Shrieky and Benji
What: Look! Look! It's a demonically tainted nightmare!
Where: In Wolfgang's Haus of frands
When: Pre-Fairytale plot
Notes: nope!
Warnings: Nightmares, demons, and flies. Possibly some body horror, because Shrieky has issues.

Shrieky slept naked, which could have made this a little awkward in different circumstances. His bedroom had originally had two beds in it, but he's pushed them together into one super bed, so that Benji can sit up in it reading while he waits to go to sleep.

Shrieky, for his own part, has pulled the blanket that he stole from Yahlii - his missing and presumed dead former housemate - up and around himself, so that his arms and legs are wrapped in a loose cocoon of fabric. Normally, he'd sleep more casually, with his limbs sticking out at awkward angles from beneath the quilt. He's making allowances though, to try and preserve Benji's precious eyes from having to see his junk. Again. ~~Shrieky has difficulties with navigation in the morning, and he's very sorry about that one time, okay?~~

He shifts, slightly, watching her through heavily lidded eyes.

"So, once I'm gone, you'll be able to follow me in? You'll find me quickly, won't you?"

He knows the answers already, she's been more than thorough in her explanations. By now he's just talking to delay the encroaching tide of sleep that's poised to overcome him.

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Rolled over on her stomach in a comfortable splay, Benji pins down the book with folded arms, reading despite the fact that the words are getting fuzzier at the edges. She lies on the covers, dressed in neutral, comfortable fabrics bought expressly to sleep in, chin in hand, and giving off the kind of patient and calm vibes that only really come about when you are naturally patient, calm, and a little bit sedated. Bare feet cross at the ankles, kicked up.

She turns her attention off the book, looking to Shrieky. "Yes," she assures. "It's a little like a current. I'm always being pulled in directions. It used to be harder to choose, when I first got this ability."

"Yes. Good. That is very good." He mumbles. For the last few minutes he's been alternating between closing his eyes for a few minutes (just to rest them) and forcing them back open to look at Benji some more. It wasn't really working anymore.

"Where did you get it from?" It seems like a strange way of saying it, like someone had given it to her, and he can't help but wonder. Any answer, however, will fall upon increasingly deafening ears, as Shrieky closes his eyes again.

It's just to rest them, just for a few minutes... but then the rise and fall of his chest begins to even out, and he sleeps.

And he dreams.

He's laying on a bare mattress in a room with broken windows. The house he lived in when he first left the inn, the first place he thought of as a home that he had actually chosen. The place where the nightmares first started.

His hair lifts and swirls above his head, like he's underwater, and he still has his tail, but he has legs as well. In that strange way that sometimes happens in dreams, the two contradictory things are simultaneously true.

A fly lazily buzzes into the room, and Shrieky stares at it, laying flat on his back on the mattress. He shouldn't move. He doesn't want to move.

"From my mother," is the answer, anyway, framing the question as traits passed down, as natural as blue eyes, dark hair, white skin. Benji isn't offended when she doesn't get a response, further conversation, just closes the book she's reading and settles into a comfier recline, an arm folded beneath her head, the other creeping out. Her hand finds a place to rest on Shrieky's shoulder, a light touch that becomes heavier by the time she's being dragged into sleep as well.

The setting doesn't change. Shrieky can possibly sense her presence, a signature adjustment that makes the air smell faintly of jasmine, otherwise impossible to define as anything but a feeling of not being alone. She remains like this for a moment, her presence within the dream steeped in the cold floor, the wooden grain of a window sill, careful to change nothing.

Benji is by the window, then, leaning against the wall. She's dressed nicely, almost maturely, in a plain black dress, a matching cardigan bundled around her. Simple and comfortable in the way she can be in the waking world, but undoubtedly more sophisticated and feminine, her feet in lightly heeled shoes. Different, too, is her hair -- it's a natural tone of red, a little curlier, much longer, but the woman remains otherwise recognisable in the same way Shrieky both has legs and a tail.

She looks over her shoulder at the broken in window, the missing glass.

Through the broken glass, a second meandering fly enters. The whine of it's wings is far louder than it should be in the otherwise silent room. The air grows heavy, until pulling it into your lungs feels like a physical effort.

The whine has multiplied, and more flies have appeared, a small haze of them whirling around the mattress, as if they're drawn by rotten meat. Shrieky still doesn't move, staring up through them at the ceiling, he would like to turn his head or sit up. He can smell jasmine and he feels certain that if he could just sit up and look for Benji, then wherever he looked for her, there she would be. It plays out in his head over and over while he tries to direct his body to sit up, and still he doesn't move.

The flies begin to drop, alighting on his bare chest and legs and tail, and there's a strange, sulphuric smell winding through the room. Beside Benji, something moves, and then doesn't move. Doesn't flinch. Doesn't breathe. No pulse twitches in it's throat. A tall, suited, man who is not a man, whose face is obscured by shadow.

She minces closer to Shrieky with a scuff of shoes against the hard floor, enough so that he can just make her out at the corner of his eye -- the red may be unfamiliar, but in dreams, it doesn't matter. Her present manifestation is unquestionably her. Unsure whether to interfere just yet -- she had always been told to wait, to understand, lest she make things worse -- she simply observes enough to see if he is choosing not to move or is unable to.

It's then that she notices something else, first the smell, then the shape just out of direct vision, but she doesn't yet pay it visible mind as she moves to Shrieky's side, a hand going out to brush aside the dead insects that have dropped on her friend's chest, before looking over.

"It's rude to stare," she chides, very quietly, although it's pretty unclear if staring is a thing that's happening right now.

"If staring is rude then what is trespassing?"

The voice is thick and wet, like someone trying to speak through a mouthful of tar. It comes not from the figure, but rather, sounds directly inside her head. It is not actually been spoken, but rather it has been woven into the very fabric of the dream.

Shrieky still doesn't move. He can feel Benji's hand on his chest, but it feels like an iron weight, crushing his chest flat and forcing his lungs empty, so that his breaths are shallow and frail. His heart's beating faster now, and more flies are dropping, more than there were to start with, more than enough to fit in his room and they're landing on his face as well and he's afraid that one of his shallow breaths will suck one into him, and they'll lay eggs in his lungs and burst him open.

It doesn't happen, of course. None of the flies go up his nose.

Instead, he exhales hard, and one crawls out of it. Then another. Then another.

The figure has moved from the wall without having to actually move. He's close now, only a few feet from the edge of the mattress, and in the shadows, further back, there are others.

She's listening to more than just-- you know, the perception of noise, the conventional things. She can hear the stress points of the dream, and she cautiously lifts her hand when she almost senses that gravity she's causing -- draws in and out an imagined breath, a hand travelling up to where a silver pendant hangs from a thin chain on her neck. She grips it in a first to reassure herself, and it's the only outward show of insecurity. She is impossible to read, here, a blank silhouette in the dream filled with only how she presents herself, but also that knowledge available to Shrieky that she is Benji.

"I've been invited," she argues, her voice very gentle, almost at a breathy whisper where volume doesn't matter because it's stitched into the fabric of the drink likewise. "I've been invited because I've been asked to help. I'd like very much to do that. Who am I talking to?"

Even as she finishes speaking, there are more of them. A cluster of dark bodies slowly filling up the room, figures bleeding out of the shadows behind her, pressing forward towards the bed.

"Not by me."

More flies crawl out of Shrieky's nose, and his mouth falls slack suddenly, so that a cluster of the insects can emerge from there as well, crawling and fluttering over lips and tongue, before flitting up to swarm above him, at Benji's eye level.

There's a sort of redirection in the nightmare now. Like Shrieky is less the subject, and more the object of it. Another ugly facet of a dream which is trying to befall her rather than him.

"You are addressing the occupant."

This is awful.

But it's also just a dream. That's a knowledge frequently impressed upon her, by Hokuto, by Delia. You're king of something fleeting and temporary and wonderful. Although this isn't wonderful, and she is still in the habit of being affected -- she flinches away from the swarm of bugs. One of them abruptly turns into a white moth, fluttering dainty, soundlessly. Another pops into this shape.

But that's all she does, pressing down the urge to just hurriedly patch things over. There might be a time for some sort of battle of wills, but for now, she owes it to Shrieky to approach this thoughtfully, not out of her own discomfort. It's just a dream, is an idea she tries to will to the part of this place that is her friend. If she cannot touch his deathly form, then she will try for comfort some other way.

"Yes," she agrees, glancing down at Shrieky's face, obscured by the insects crawling out of it. "You're occupying. I want to know who you are. We could trade names."

The figures are close now, feet pressed against the edge of the mattress, and crowded all around so that they can lean in to stare at Shrieky, faces still obscured by shadows that couldn't possibly have been cast by anything. From behind Benji, they usher her forward, trying to force her to close the circle around him, to lean down and stare with them. To absorb her into their ranks.

The thought she sends does reach Shrieky, under the darkness and the crawl of tiny feet across his teeth and tongue, and normally he would eventually draw this same conclusion himself. Some stray thought would break through the strangeness that was befalling him, and he would realize that what was happening could not have been real. Now though, with Benji standing over him, talking as though she was awake and with the strange figment of his nightmares for these many months talking back? He finally understands that dreams too, are reality. This isn't something that will dissipate and leave when he wakes up, but rather something that will squat inside of him, waiting for his return each night. A prison from which waking is a brief parole rather than a release.

"Names..." The thing hisses, "...How human, to think that all things have names, and how naieve to think I know yours not, after we've lived together for so many weeks now."

Shrieky's chest heaves, and he retches, and a glut of flies rise from his throat, like a huge, writhing droplet of some viscous liquid falling into the air.

"Some things go by descriptors, functions, and identifiers, but as you like, you shall have mine: I am Hypha. As you are Dreamwalker. As he is Shrieky."

Benji remains stiff as a board as they begin to press in. It isn't her nightmare so how dare she feel unsettled; which doesn't stop her from throwing up her hands as that swarm of insects floods out to thicken the air, managing to not make a sound even if she would if this were real life.

Shrieky. That seems an unkind name, and certainly a new one to her. But it doesn't ring as false, in the same way the title bestowed upon her doesn't either.

"Hypha," she repeats, her voice becoming brittle, lifting her eyes from Mermaid to look at the figures pressing close, beside her, across the bed from her, a kind of fiendishly bright blue. "So you admit you're a parasite, and tell me I'm trespassing. I think it's time you went away and left my friend alone."

If it was as easy as that-- well, it won't be, she knows. It's almost more affirmation for Shrieky than Hypha.

"He made himself fertile." Hypha whispers, and there's suddenly grass and mud beneath their feet, rather than floorboards and mattresses. "He made himself fertile, and a home was made. Into which you do trespass, Dreamwalker."

Something's being passed around the circle of leaning figures. A thin line of fishing wire, that's ushered into Benji's hands and onwards, so that the line spools through her palms and across her fingers. There's a kind of pressure on her now, that this is how the dream goes and she shouldn't worry about what she would or would not do if she was awake. She's in the circle, and the people in the circle hold the fishing line, and that is a part of the dream.

There's a powerful certainty to it, the assumption that she'll go along with the ebb and flow of what must happen now woven deep into the tapestry of the dream, in an attempt to obscure any of her own instincts to resist.

"We belong."

Her jaw hardens a little at that feeling, that current of narrative, it's one she's felt before, one she needs to navigate carefully. The effort might mean that her current appearance would fade, but the opposite is true -- she is a less real version of herself, skin too smooth, a metallic sheen to her hair, a vibrant light behind eyes, as if she would sooner shatter and splinter if struck than bleed.

"You can go away," she says again, "or you can die."

She's not even sure she can do that. She might need Wolfgang, somehow, magic to counter magic, but maybe it doesn't matter and maybe she is powerful enough. But doubt cannot be read from her -- nothing can save for what she projects now, what she says. That said, she reluctantly allows herself to be drawn with the current -- it's hit a few crescendos already and if she has to drag Shrieky to her own mind, somewhere safer, she will. But she also needs to see where this goes.

The fishing line suddenly jerks taut in her hands, and the walls of the room fall away. The grass beneath her feet is slick with mud, and she's standing a few feet from the edge of a moat. Somehow the figures have amassed themselves behind her, so that all there is between her and the water is dark earth and the thin fishing line.

Behind her someone pulls on the line hard, and a sound erupts from the moat. Loud and shrill and monstrous, a shriek of fear or rage, enough that it vibrates through the dream profoundly and painfully. Then the wire pulls back against them, trying to drag her forward towards the waters edge. Towards the black depths.

She cries out, a very human and instinctive response that the jury's out on whether it makes her an amateur at this -- it's startled at both the action, and the rage that ziplines through the make of the dream, electrical.

It's just that she doesn't expect that pull back, her feet sliding in the damp mud as she's drawn closer to the inky water's edge. The tension that thrums up and down the wire she's still holding can almost be felt as heat, and she's in some precarious position in between -- neither wishing to assist the beings behind her, but very reluctant to be dragged into the watery moat.

The next surge of strength almost tugs her off her feet altogether, before she hooks her fingers. Nails that are black and razor-edged in that ever exaggerated and frightening show of femininity she gravitates towards in these in spaces, they rake against the fishing wire in an effort to slice through it, to break it of its tension and cast both warring parties away from one another.

Behind Benji, the wire pulls back hard, dragging through her hands until the tip of a thrashing golden tail breaks through the surface of the moat, just in time for the tension from behind her to loosen again, and for Shrieky to plunge forward again into the water, harder, and more frantic now.

It's a fishing technique, dragging the fish in, then letting it try to escape, over and over until it's exhausted. Only with each drag in the shriek gets higher and louder, more desperate and agonized, and with each escape attempt Benji is dragged closer to the edge of the moat.

Under the scrape of her fingernails the wire begins to fray, and behind her, the force of the struggle intensifies in response. They're working against her now, dragging Shrieky in more quickly and forcefully, and letting him drag back with just as much panic and strength.

The story is a powerful one, and Benji feels-- maybe knows, but how much logic can she depend upon-- that to ignore it would be a mistake. Her stance buckles, knees sliding closer to water edge, one hand going out to brace herself as she twists to look back at the villains trying reel Mermaid in.

That frayed point continues to weaken beneath the stress of the tugging, and finally she switches her grip -- she takes a hold behind it, winds it around her hand, digs in heels, and pulls back against the Hypha. If she tumbles back into the water, by virtue of the wire's release or Shrieky's own panic, then, well--

She'll be fine. It's only a dream.

The wire snaps, and it lashes out at her like a whip, sharp and thin across her face. Shrieky's gone though. In an instant, he's gone. Buried himself in the silt at the bottom of the moat, and far away from flies and the creeping certainty of mold that infects the surface.

The Hypha seem to dissipate, and suddenly they're fishermen and villagers, men throwing lines into the water, and mothers chiding their children to stay away from the edge.

Lest Shrieky comes and gets them.

And there are knights, and maidens, and it's all like some pretty fantasy world, and it's hard to tell who the villain in the nightmare is anymore.

Maybe it's hard for both of them.

By the time the struggle is over, Benji is more or less kneeling on the soft ground next to the moat, hands hovering as if to protect herself and still feeling the sting of lashing wire. She simply remains there and breathes for a moment, more upset than she'd counted on being and knowing it's her own fault for allowing herself to become involved in the story, but--

Pushing waves of near-metallic red locks back from her face, she ignores the fantastical and ordinary people that populate the bank as she edges towards the water. She isn't sure she'll find much, and a strange kind of guilt has her be slow moving, her palms sinking into grass and dirt.

"Mermaid?"

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