∞ [ 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. ]

Comments

[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. "