fatespoken | ∞ [ a dream ]

∞ [ a dream ]

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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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."

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."

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?"

"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.

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."

"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."

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?"

"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.

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.

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∞ [ a dream ]

as it's winding down to zero

as it's winding down to zero

as it's winding down to zero

as it's winding down to zero

as it's winding down to zero

as it's winding down to zero

as it's winding down to zero

as it's winding down to zero

as it's winding down to zero