+ Let's go for a dreamwalk! + [OPEN PLOT CATCH-ALL]

[mviw]

Who: Everyone who wants to participate!
Where: The Mindscape (and elsewhere in reality, if specified)
When: September 6th through September 8th
Rating: PG-13 to R for potentially disturbing, violent, or dark subjects.
Summary: Thanks to an explosion on the third floor, every time a person falls asleep, they enter the Mindscape...

The Story:
Plot information is here!

Comments

[postictal]

He's seen better days. He's gaunt, paler than usual, shoulders shuddering as they sag in utter defeat. There's something he keeps looking at, but whatever it is, it doesn't reveal itself. He trembles on the spot. He doesn't want to. He doesn't want to.

But he slides off the bed regardless, and begins to unwind the sheets from the frame of the cot, arranging them at the join between the floor and the wall farthest from the door.

His gaze skirts across the room one last time. His eyes settle on Georgia, only for a moment.

Then he blinks, and shakes himself. It isn't real. Can't look at things that aren't real.

He breathes in. His thumb presses against the lighter until the bright tongue of flame clicks to life with the soft spit of sparks.

The weight of the action holds him still for several long moments as he considers the stilling fire. His breath lurches in and out in uneven, panicked bursts until finally his eyes squeeze shut, his free hand pressing at his temple as if to ward off an incipient headache.

Does he have to?


He presses the flame to the sheets.

It doesn't take long for them to catch alight.

[choosetruth]

Shit. She takes an almost involuntary step forward, trying to--she doesn't know what, except she doesn't actually want to go into that white room even if the fire, so bright and out of place and not white, makes it more appealing.

The fact that a room that's on fire is more appealing than a white room is probably something she should worry about, but that's a problem to deal with later.

At least she can think more clearly now. She recognizes the boy now, who looks vaguely familiar but doesn't click into place until she remembers that event where they were children. This is Tim. Just as a child.

A child setting a hospital on fire. That... probably isn't good. The trouble is, judging by the fact that Tim is generally a whole lot older than this, this is a memory. Which means he'll probably survive the experience, judging from his existence as an adult, which means she doesn't have to worry about the fact she's not sure she should stop it even if she can and the fact that there's a certain part of her, an increasingly angry part, that is more than happy to see a hospital room go up in flames.

But she isn't sure enough to move away. She'll see this through. She has to.

cw suicide ideation

[postictal]

The flames chase up the walls remarkably quickly, chewing through paint and brick and wood. There's just enough of the walls that counts as flammable to feed into it easily, and Tim has to duck his head and yank up the neck of his pale shirt to breathe through the fabric as the smoke starts to spill out in thick black billows.

He races for the door, but doesn't yet start to hammer at it with clenched fists. If he had his window, he could have escaped that way. If he starts screaming and throwing a fit, they'll know it was him. They'll know why it started in his room.

So he has to wait for the fire to start to eat into the other rooms.

Even if it means he's still inside it when it all goes up.

[choosetruth]

"Kid...." He has to make it out if this is a memory. Georgia fixes that in her head. She doesn't know what she could do either way--she's trained for many things, but rescuing a child from a burning hospital room isn't one of them--but it still just feels wrong to stand by and do nothing.

She has to ask Tim about this later.

She wants to look away. She makes herself keep watching. She's come this far, she has to see it through.

[postictal]

The smoke alarms start to squeal. There's the patter of footsteps up and down hallways, the shouts of urgency and confusion. Eventually, someone starts to unlock the doors leading to the rooms of the patients. A nurse with scrubs stained black with soot finally presses the door open, beckoning Tim out with shouts that smear into indistinct noise, indistinguishable from the roar of the flame. He's already begun to cough, eyes streaming and red, huddling against the door even as the knob starts to heat and the fire begins to chew away at the walls surrounding him, racing ever closer, closer -

Tim glances back, once, his eyes wide and dark with terror.

They settle upon Georgia, the lady he doesn't know, but the nurse doesn't acknowledge her whatsoever - meaning she isn't real.

Just like the man behind her. He can't read its lack of a face, but he knows, he knows, that it's...happy with him. The thought makes him want to retch.

The nurse starts to usher him out and down the length of hallway. He bolts ahead, unimpeded.

There's only one place he can go to be safe.

[choosetruth]

George stares after him for a second before sighing. "Fuck it." She's seeing this through to the end. And apparently that means running through a burning building now.

[postictal]

The nurse calls out for him to wait for the other patients. He doesn't heed her advice - or anything else she has to say, for that matter. There's a loud crack of something destabilizing, the heart-shaking crash of it all crumbling into the floor. The ceiling rains blazing chunks of plaster and wood, the cinderbrick and asphalt in the walls scorched black.

And still, he continues to run, halting only to seize at what little solid remnants of the wall he can find to stabilize himself, only to immediately snatch his hand back with a muffled cry when it scalds the skin of his palm. He turns on the spot in a startled revolution. His eyes track the tangle of halls, those blocked out by the roar of flames, those that have caved in, and eventually bolts for one of the few openings he can detect.

A lancing pain slams into his temples without warning, without any pointers as to its etiology, and Tim screams, doubling over with both hands clamped to his head. Tears fill his eyes as he huddles onto the ground with a howl.

"Let me out! Let me out!" He can't breathe, his lungs thick and filled with smoke, his head spinning. "It's not - it was right there!"

He points, his eyes wild, at a smoldering spot of wall. There's nothing there - nothing but fire.

"It was right there!"

[choosetruth]

"What was right there?" Georgia asks, frowning as she stands behind Tim. The smoke doesn't affect her, which confirms what she's been assuming... this isn't real, she isn't here. There's nothing she can do but watch.

Tim's going to be okay. He is, in the future. Or the present. Whichever.

[postictal]

It was there, It was there, he knows It was. He knows It had to be, because he can feel It pressing down on the back of his head, burning away at his skull, and he's trying to stumble haphazardly along with little success, one hand planted against the wall until the wall gets too hot for even the barest, briefest touch.

"Go away," he mumbles to his feet. The fire nearly drowns him out as he presses on through the rasping, wheezing coughs that swell like tumors in his lungs. "Let me - out."

There's a roaring, shuddering crash as the ceiling caves on itself, and Tim's hands fly up over his head with a startled cry. He tries to run, but anyone could tell that he's not going to make it out, not before he's crushed beneath the debris raining from the ceiling.

He hurls himself forward the last few steps, sprawls flat on the heated cement -




And the world shutter-clicks into black for a split second like the great lens of a camera blinking shut.

Tim lies sprawled in the grass, soot-stained and ragged, his face streaked with ash and grime, his hair slick and dark with sweat. The distant scream of sirens and the coil of black smoke spiraling lazily into the sky indicates that the hospital itself can't be far, but where they are, there's nothing but trees.

[choosetruth]

"That's enough."

She backs out, trying to find the edge of the memory. He's alive. Not happy, but alive. And the hospital that had been holding him is burned to the ground. She... probably shouldn't be as satisfied about that as she is, but it doesn't seem like it was treating Tim any better than hers every treated her. Fuck hospitals.

Of course, the edge of the memory is yet another hospital, but a wreck of one. That makes it more bearable.

[postictal]

The edge of the memory will appear if she looks hard enough - a door, set between the crooks of the trees, unmistakable in the worn, cracked gray of its surface. Tim, for his part, doesn't stir.

He has nothing to wake up to just now.