∞ [ a dream ]

[fatespoken]

Two-hundred eighty nine kilometers per mile, sixty seconds per minute contracting, reverberating electric against your spine like a million cells exploding. The air presses against your skin, while the metal car sways back and forth and rips balance from beneath your feet. If you stand, you will fall. Metal will scream until all you can hear is your heartbeat, pounding uniform, skittering beats, a hundred even micesteps within your chest. The train is crashing, and time retards; seconds suppress their weight into viscous ticks of a clock. All of them cry. A hundred people in the car break their fingernails into brown-leather seats, but you can't hear them because the metal's screaming too loud.

If you look on their faces, you will see them yelling; moreover, you will see their wounds bleeding into their skin. Not real wounds, rather shadows creeping above their skin. They're dusky, translucent imprints where injury will be, as if fate has already marked them. Hasn't it already? The train screeches against the tracks, and the axle juts up through the bottom metal, cracking through the floor so that it clips a woman. A track tie follows and slices up to impale the right side of the car.

Outside the windows, staring through the foggy marks of hand-prints, you will see the ocean: bruised, dark waters pin back a purple sky and lie stagnant against chaos.
 

[ ooc: Prose or [] are fine! Your character may or may not meet Amory, or if he or she does, it may be later on, as several people from his world will be paying a visit. You're free to kill your character or wound them during the dream, and the pain can either be dampened or felt at full strength. It's up to you!

Each thread should be a new iteration unless you'd like to coordinate something with another character. ]

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as it's winding down to zero

[adamantined]

Claire doesn't know how she gets in the train, but one moment she is not there and the next she is, seated and waiting for a stop. Her clothes are finally dry, though her shoes are still damp and dirty, and it's with this thought in mind that she realizes halfway through the action that the train she is riding is crashing. Someone shouts, screams, and the coppery tang of blood sticks in the air, cloying like humidity.

Up is down and colors streak into each other with enough force to knock the breath out of her, though she keeps holding on until she realizes that she's not. She's not holding on because she is not in the train. Instead, she is standing to the side and watching it crash, and while her first instinct is to dive in and pull people out, it seems more pertinent to find out whose head this is, where this is, what this is.

Back in the train, and though the chaos hasn't stopped, the train's motion seems to have stopped. Claire blinks and looks around for a familiar face.

as it's winding down to zero

[fatespoken]

A figure appears beside Claire, though not so much as appears as that he suddenly is. It's no one she recognizes, unless Claire could see past the darkness in that found photograph: the man who wore glass and blood without a grimace. By the dim, violet light that sifts through the shattered window, he's shown to be a middle-age man, a face that has always belied its age, even when middle years were all it covered. His shoulders are firm, his posture straight, his dark auburn hair and eyes hazel. A large, shard of glass is lodged deep within his cheek, and blood pools beneath the wound, dripping thin, red streams onto the crisp collar of a white shirt. He lifts a hand to his cheek, also covered with blood within the cracks of his palm and the narrows of his fingers. His expression is unaffected as he looks at Claire, reaching over to pluck the glass from his cheek as if pulling lint off a coat

"Terrible, is it not?" the man states firmly, his voice exact and loud amidst the screaming. The gouge on his cheek heals cleanly, leaving the skin completely smooth.

as it's winding down to zero

[adamantined]

The face might not be familiar, but if it's speaking to her then she at least has to have found some sort of connecting point between dream and dreamer. At least that's what she tells herself, pushing up onto her elbows and looking down to find herself remarkably unscathed, save for a few pieces of broken glass that have caught in her skin here and there. Claire brushes them away with the same careful indifference, sitting up in the process.

There's no point in helping the people around the two of them, and though Claire doesn't manage to drown out the noises and smells, she does manage to close the door on them somewhat. Legs bent beneath her, she grips the edge of one of the leather seats and finally faces the only other person sitting upright. "That's one way of putting it," she replies, looking around the immediate area for lack of anything better to do. "I didn't see you here before the crash."

as it's winding down to zero

[fatespoken]

There are no exits on this wrecked train, ripped metal leading only to a limitless expanse of bruised ocean; incredibly, the water does not flow into the train, liquid divided from matter by some staunch, invisible dike. One has to wonder where the tracks lay, on what ground the train could have have ripped off the track, considering that there is no ground in sight. But dreams need not explain its physics to the literal and rational.

Moans and cries of distress puncture the air, then gradually, the sound is stretched thin to mono, detaching itself from the immediate as though funneled to some quiet, small space. The man takes a seat beside him, untouched by the pandemonium, its brown leather as intact as it had been when the unknowing passengers first boarded (if they ever did). Underneath, an arm lies extended, the whiteness of the fingers implying all that needs to be said.

"No, you did not see me," he confirms, tipping his head upward to address her. The man folds his hands in his lap, letting blood smear against clean fingers, and though little has yet to be said, he addresses Claire with an acuteness-- a deeper, secret awareness evinces in light hazel. "But I am here, and always have been, Claire."

as it's winding down to zero

[adamantined]

For as little as there is to explain regarding the physics of dreams, there is even less needed to be asked. The bruised purple and blue exterior world seems perfectly logical, rational, to Claire, who has managed to pull herself further up from the floor. Fingernails prick against brown letter, and she leaves dark red finger paint in a long streak along the seat she uses to haul her weight up. It's only after investigating what seems like the blood's sudden appearance that she realizes her shirt has soaked a rag's worth of it up, all of it blossoming from some discarded hunk of twisted metal that has punched its way through her abdomen.

She removes it only once she's gotten to her feet, and the resulting clank against the floor signals the division between Claire, this man, and the rest of the train like a curtain falling. Claire takes a seat next to him and stares down at the white fingertips on the floor. Even if there's nothing to be done, there is still a pull within her to do something, but sitting here seems more prudent.

"You aren't exactly the face that I had in mind for the end of the line," she admits suspiciously. Her eyes narrow and dart over to him. Claire might not recognize him, but he certainly feels familiar. "What are you doing here? Are you some kind of bird watcher except with trains?"

as it's winding down to zero

[middlestate.livejournal.com]

"Whom did you imagine?" he answers, betraying nothing in the taut line of his voice. "Who else would wait for you? Surely, not them, if that is what you believe. They will not cease for you." His voice gestures to the corpses below.

The man pays no mind to the bloom of blood on Claire's shirt. Meanwhile, he's turning over fingers with careful inspection, bringing them to his lips; an edge of a sharp tooth reflects in the light, and his tongue glances over a particularly thick patch of blood. It's still wet, somehow shining, in the dim, purple light. Lucas Felix would never be this much of a savage, regardless of the pains he had to take to temper all his sharp edges. But how else would you paint somehow you disliked than in the negative?

Claire's own memories- her self- bleeds into this dream, affecting it in small ways. The foundation and frame stay the same, but the variables change, shifting bricks around.

as it's winding down to zero

[adamantined]

Those shifts are small, barely noticeable: new faces mixed in with the dead and dying. A man groans in the corner, and she remembers him from a train crash what feels like a million years ago and yesterday all at once. Claire can remember with perfect clarity how the heat had felt against her skin, how the smoke had tasted, the rush of adrenaline that had spurred both upon entering the crashed car and dragging the man out of it. She can remember how it felt to watch Jackie claim what had been hers. But it's not the feelings that linger, just the faces and the smells and the tastes, and Claire isn't even paying much attention to them, focused instead on the mouth of the man sitting next to her.

Things fall into place slowly, but she's still not offering any answers.

"There are a few dimensional differences that are separating us, for starters," she eventually replies, lip curling involuntarily at the way the man next to her brings bloody fingers to his lips. No matter how often she tastes it, she'll never get used to it. As an afterthought, she wipes at what is still caked around her mouth. "Not to mention I've got no idea who you are or what you want."

as it's winding down to zero

[middlestate.livejournal.com]

"What do I want? Our meeting was purely coincidence—" he looks toward her, slipping his hand against his leg in that brief transition. The previous moment seems like a mistake, incongruous as if a mirage, even with little light to bend it. Once again, he is a man, like any other man, his teeth slipped away behind the trappings of gentleman. "Waiting. I am only waiting."

He continues to look at her, awaiting a response. Subtle— that's certainly a word fit for encompassing him: he is superficially impassive, yes, neither words or countenance giving any clues away except uncertainty. However, it isn't a cold impassiveness; something lies beyond the calm expression, shrouded, but not terrible. Not like Amory whose ire can bleed right through the plaster.

"You may join me if you wish."

as it's winding down to zero

[adamantined]

Since she doesn't seem to have any other options at the moment - usually doors or windows will open for her, bottoms dropping down or ceilings peeling back like sardine cans, but this time there is nothing but empty minutes clicking away - she waits. It seems strange and yet not strange to sit here like this, in the middle of all these faces - some contorted with injury and others pockmarked with glass and blood - and not react, but Claire can't find the intention in her anywhere, almost as if this is what she is supposed to be doing within this dream and deviating from it is an impossibility.

"What are we waiting for?" she asks, hands on her knees. Claire glances once down at her ruined and bloody shirt and then looks back up at the man next to her. With a sarcastic tilt to her tone, she says, "A train?"

as it's winding down to zero

[middlestate.livejournal.com]

"What are waiting for?" he hesitates in meditation, folding his fingers together into his lap, letting his shoulders lean inward, only slightly, "We will know when it arrives, Claire. For now, it is necessary that we wait."

Her sarcasm is ignored. These echoes of people are filtered through Amory's mind, spliced and fractured through the cut of a dream. They may come off as oblique, for their conversations are divided into jagged segments and their personalities reduced to fractals. It's either seemingly melodramatic enigmatic or non-nonsensical abstraction. Or maybe it's something else.

as it's winding down to zero

[adamantined]

She'd like to press the issue further, drag it out until she has the answers that she wants. Instead, she watches the way the colors spin across the opposite wall: shadows and tinted red glass muting what sunshine is left like shining a light through a jar of cherries. The silence becomes eerie, and Claire wonders if everyone around them hasn't died or at least bubbled them into this strange waiting room of a world so that they might experience it undisturbed. Sitting there with her hands on her knees and blood crusting in her hair, Claire thinks that they could at least play some music while she waits for whatever it is that's coming.

She hopes it's the next dream.

Before she can let the overwhelming sense of nothing get to her, Claire turns to look up at the man next to her again. If she squints, he looks like he could be familiar in darkness. "So what's your name?" she asks casually. At any moment she might inspect her fingernails, though she doesn't know why. Even she isn't the type of person to react so calmly to what is shaping up to look and smell like the end of the world.

[worksmart.livejournal.com]

Slow-motion clarity allowed him to see the transition of those last seconds when everthing was fine as they shuddered and jerked through to chaos. Things caught midair, bags too hastily stowed in overhead compartments crashing and exploding in bursts of personal detritus skimming through like shrapnel. The tray pulled down in front of him for his coffee impact with the bridge of his ribcage and there's no sound but the wet crunch from deep inside.

Screams register only when he's thrown back: into his chair and under it as it collapses down. Somewhere above the metal roof peels like a ripped can-lid but he's folded into a corner, almost too tight to breathe if he could find air through all this liquid.

He should be helping. There are pleas, demands for that. Concertina-pressed between what used to be the floor and what used to be a seat Chase tells himself that he will in a minute. Time's so slow. In a minute.

[fatespoken]

Chase's intent to play the hero is foiled by an inversion. A hand encircles his upper-arm, clenched tightly, brusque in the careless motion that rips him up to his feet, like a dog caught hiding in a place debarred from him. He's not offered a seat, only shoved onto his feet to stand on his own, the doctor's state disregarded for efficiency. The hand's grip lingers, and from its impression, one might discern a man of medium figure: he's tall enough for Chase's head to reach his neck, his form naturally robust. Though the light that filters through the cracked glass is dim and murky, if he should manage to turn his head, he will see a face distinct. Dark blond hair, gray eyes bordered by shadows, a straight nose set above quirk of a smile, scornful as its default.

The bodies are all among him, bleeding on the floor or moaning in final laments of pain. There are cries crying 'Doctor, Doctor', perhaps all in Chase's imagination, or an actualization of his thoughts for this is a nightmare-- both someone's nightmare and a dark canvas for others. Somehow, the voices seem to escalate in volume, too vivid a scene to merely be the imagined image of one's mind.

"They'll mistake you for the dead, Robert Chase," the man finally declares, traces of humor lining his voice.

[worksmart.livejournal.com]

Chase's intent to play the hero would have been foiled by the enveloping darkness before it ever came about. Lung punctured, he's bleeding into his chest cavity and spitting up what won't fit there in dark, sticky rivulets down his chin. Shock numbs the pain until that hand drags at him and rearranges the piercing shards inside, and then he's screaming again, hoarsely, twisted to find somewhere or something to cling to.

"Not sure they'd be mistaken." he coughs up finally, arm hooked around a seat-back and not looking not looking at where the chair's former occupant and the window lie smashed on the floor together. Triage. That's no one's priority now.

Blinking wide, he looks up at the stranger beside him, ready to fall back or fall forward but teetering upright for now. "I can't... can't help. Call... Princeton Plainsboro."

[fatespoken]

Eager to be of assistance, of course, he grabs Chase up by the collar and lifts him onto the seat, luckily empty, besides for the passenger on the seat next to him, too shadowed in the dark to be seen. Blood glides in thin streams across the arm rest and drip in steady beats, tapping out a slow rhythm against clean leather. Surprising as it may sound, this is not an act of intentional cruelty, but true stolidity without the pretense making it seem otherwise.

The man lets the doctor gather himself, as much as a dying man can, taking the spare moment to remove a layer of glass sprinkled on his arm, in his hair; he shakes it all lose. The clear shards catch in his skin and mark thin, red lines on tanned skin, to which he frowns, cursing under his breath. He then move a thumb to slide against the wound: the skin wipes clear the next second.

"A hospital? No-- No. Don't be a fool, that's too easy." he says with a shrug, turning gray to meet blue, "You won't find one in here. Likely, yours doesn't exist out there."

[worksmart.livejournal.com]

Of course. Assistance is exactly the term Chase would use for this kind of manhandling, at least in the terms of assisting him to shut down faster. Even seated, there's a dizziness to his focus on the world that means even his own body doesn't feel solid to the touch when he claps his arms around his chest and tries to hold something in. That this is a dream state hasn't begun to register, but when Chase tries to pin the reason he's on this train, to say that of course it exists out there, he finds that those things don't register. Never happened.

"Royal... Melbourne." he tries, stubbornly, reason still working enough to narrow down his likely locations to a list of two. "Just call."

[anaitos.livejournal.com]

"You're being very rude, Robert. Very, very rude. I'm talking to you," he chides, "You're frustrating me, and I want to ask you something."

It's with a clinical eye that he studies Chase, noting his pallor, the blood drying on his lips, imagining his frame in the very skeleton of its design, flesh failing him with blood in the cavern of his chest. He can see it all with his sight, everything in sharp quality beneath layers of skin. "Fragile, flimsy construction. How did I forget? Can't forget, can I?," he mutters to himself, a tch following his last word.

Light humor to annoyance, and then warm fingers slamming dry ice against Chase's chest- pushing the shards in deeper as he buries his fingers against the injury. It's a familiar cold, akin to the cold that had followed the erased bruise on his face, but there's a harsher bite to it this time. Rows of relentless, invisible needles slam into his wounded organ, sinking in deep and clinging tenaciously as Chase's lungs start to mend, tissue pulling together, blood draining inwards. However, the repair stops before it can get too far. The man has pulled away, leaving Chase dangling between pain and finality.

Alex examines his fingers, disgust darkening his features.

"I want you to talk to me."

[worksmart.livejournal.com]

Robert gets his attention, a Pavlovian response conditioned into giving if not obedience then at least time to the few who know to use it. How lingers, in this instance, over dry lips, words lost in the flow of interntal ruptures. His vision narrows and then -- brightens, white bursting violently behind closed eyelids in the closest visual mirror of the snow crystallising through his veins. It's at once the most painful thing he can remember and the starkest sense of relief when, released, he realises that the flood in his lungs has trained to a mere trickle. It hasn't stopped; he can still feel the gurgle under the lowest timbres of his voice as he looks up and gasps enough breath to respond.

"How do you know who I am?"

[anaitos.livejournal.com]

He continues to look at Robert Chase, peering from beneath blond brows, above a mouth straightlined against rigid lineament. He's a statue of a figure, indicating nothing, offering nothing, only a cipher for a blind man to deconstruct. There's quiet before he responds, his stare unceasing as gray continues to pin Chase down.

"A friend," he pauses, "No, that's not right. An associate of mine; kin of mine. And you are his friend."

A child plucks leaves off the branches of an alder tree because he believes it is his. A man picks up handful of dirt, sifting it through through his fingers. Nature is public matter: man before the world, a god before matter. His fingers reach out, abruptly, to sink into Chase's chin, pulling him forward: an examination. "Isn't it strange?" he questions, pushing his thumb against the line of his jaw. "Does he want you? No, that's not it. What is it, then? He has always wasted his time."

[worksmart.livejournal.com]

With the semi-restoration comes a small burst of strength, enough for Chase to reach up to the arm gripping him and swat at it with all the effect of a cat's tail batting at summer flies.

"Get the hell off me." his voice, at least, doesn't shake.

"Either I fell asleep on the train and you're the weirdest dream in living memory, or you're listening to people die around you because you're jealous someone likes me better." He recognised that burst of magic, though it's only now that he understands how recognising it pulls him out of New Jersey, and away from Melbourne or any place solid and sane. "You shouldn't be. He hasn't bought me flowers for weeks."

[anaitos.livejournal.com]

"Jealousy? Don't be foul, Robert."

He maintains his grip, tilting Chase's head to the side to observe him obliquely. There lies no hint of anything brewing beneath; no sense of want, nothing but stone set into flesh, detachment prevailing.

"It is his dream, and so they are already dead. We are observing in retrospect. And this is a dream, a true dream- and it is only normal. You shouldn't be bothered. "