+ 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

[normandysbest]

[Hah, okay, great. There's the suffocation. Maybe it can hear her, maybe it could see it, or maybe she's just incredibly, incredibly unlucky.

Still, she looks through the water panicked, reaching for him, willing herself to move, trying to pass through the burning in her entire body to reach for him, to struggle, to get out, but every joint is locking, every part of her is refusing her movement, and the only thing she manages is a hand at her neck, clawing for her helmet, an old muscle memory of slowly losing air into another void.

She doesn't know what's going on. She doesn't know how she can help.

And still, she keeps an arm outstretched, reaching for Tim, despite everything else.]

[postictal]

[She's still doing her best, her absolute best, to keep him safe. Him, the source of all this. Him, the reason the entirety is on fire. Him, the reason so many have died and will continue to die.]

[A failure, on every level.]

[Liar. Liar.]

[Liar.]

[The world blinks, a camera eye clicking with a concentrated flash, and they're displaced. Now Tim hacks up water colored rusty with his own blood, splayed on his side on the cement-and-ash floor of a burned-out shell of a long-abandoned building. The long hallways mark it as familiar - the setting for the entrance into his head.]

[A hospital where a young boy spent a great deal of his life doing what he does now: screaming, gasping, and clawing at the floors as he retches and sobs.]

[Only now - ]

[Now, there is something in the room with him.]

[Can you see It, Shepard?]

[Slowly, deliberately, Its head lists to one side, surveying her with a blankness to its empty, faceless face that somehow manages to communicate something that lands between curiosity and absolute detachment. She is so utterly inconsequential, so completely and wholly peripheral to the center of Its focus that lies there gagging on the floor, that she may as well be a fly ensnared in a spider's web.]

[The entirety of Its presence slams into her skull; undiluted, unmitigated, and incalculable.]

[Death is one thing, Commander Shepard. But this?]

[This is going to hurt.]

[normandysbest]

[Shepard has been hurt in so many ways before. She's been shot, stabbed, nearly drowned, on fire more times than she can count. There's been acid and teeth and electric batons, and she's been able to fight through it all.

Nothing quite compares to this.

Once upon a time, she had gone solo to investigate something great, something powerful, under the ocean, that had taken over her brain to talk to her. She came out of that with a nosebleed and feeling like every part of her ached for days, but she had no idea what her body was actually doing at that time. This is similar- she has no clue what she actually looks like right now, can't feel enough of her limbs to figure it out. All she knows is the pain, searing through her, the way the world has blurred so hard around the edges she can't actually tell what she should even be doing right now, what's happening, what she needs to fight.

She knows she needs to fight. But not much past it.

If Tim can hear her, he's probably never heard her scream. But right now it's all she has.]

[postictal]

[The human body can only react in so many ways when faced with the unknowable. It can only contort so deeply, and strain at what contains it so far. Electrical currents fray and splinter and go haywire, and the only word for it that can even partially embrace the scope of what happens to the human body under such physiological, psychological, incredible duress, is seizure: a jerking, convulsive, ictal haze of locking muscles and convulsing limbs and arching spine.]

[Tim can hear it - his ears haven't blocked all that out completely. But he's incapable of registering whether that awful sound curdling into the blackened, burned walls belongs to him or to someone else, just as he's incapable of registering whether or not he's truly alone in this room.]

[He isn't.]

[Tim can hear it, but he's screaming too, in the way that he has before. In the way he has countless times as a child, sobbing and howling about something that wasn't truly there, couldn't be, because the doctors couldn't see it.]

[Once It has touched you, It stays with you. For a very, very long time.]

[Possibly forever.]

[You'll always look over your shoulder. You'll always feel that cold prickle of something watching. You'll start to cough, and you'll shiver, and your head will ache. Always on the periphery of your vision, always hovering just beyond what you can perceive. But when you look again, It will inevitably - no longer be there.]

[Until the day that It is.]

[normandysbest]

[When she looks back on this, eventually, it's going to be hard going convincing herself this was 'only' a dream. Not with the way this ache will stay in her, the unique feeling of frayed nerves and literal wiring inside her feeling like it's splitting, stripping, like all of who she is could come out in layers until she's nothingness, spread out against the current into nonexistence.

This isn't like the last time she died. This isn't the way she eventually had no more fight left in her. This is a battering against her cage and having nothing to fight back with. This is knowing she has to fight, being captured with just the burning in her muscles and the panic in her mind that means action, and not being able to control how she moves. Not being able to get anywhere at all.

At least, when she wakes, she'll be able to think it's over.

For a little while, at least.]