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visible_sarielEvery set of starship quarters are different, according to the personality of their owner if not to their layout.
But the lights in these quarters, whoever's they are, are low enough that those sorts of differences aren't visible. Not all that much is, to be honest.
The corridor beyond is dark too, matching the interior for gloom, and the door between rooms and hallway is wide open.
It's not closing.
But the lights in these quarters, whoever's they are, are low enough that those sorts of differences aren't visible. Not all that much is, to be honest.
The corridor beyond is dark too, matching the interior for gloom, and the door between rooms and hallway is wide open.
It's not closing.
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Date: 2012-10-22 03:10 am (UTC)No one has any reason to put him away, he hasn't hurt anyone.
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Date: 2012-10-22 03:42 am (UTC)The lights are low enough to indicate night, whether simulated or otherwise.
Not low enough to hide a circle and X symbol carved into the wall just beside that gaping doorway, however. Maybe carved is the wrong word; it looks burned, as though by a weapon with a cutting beam.
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Date: 2012-10-22 03:44 am (UTC)Something powerful made that mark and might be around, he quickly turns and looks into the shadows. Where is everyone?
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Date: 2012-10-22 03:49 am (UTC)There's another circle and X cut into the floor of the doorway itself. This one looks like a scalpel did it; it's lines are hair thin.
--lurking?
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Date: 2012-10-22 03:52 am (UTC)"Now, I never said he was mad, please don't put words into my mouth, Mrs. Xavier."
That voice, he knows that voice and he's not mad. Everyone got worried when he was small but he learned how to act like he should. His hand trembles on the lines and he's grown smaller to when he was fifteen and everything was changing.
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Date: 2012-10-22 04:06 am (UTC)No it doesn't. Drawing breath unhindered never sounded like that. Something attempts to suck in air. It's wheezing, gasping, straining. Desperate.
Those quarters aren't empty, from the direction of the noise.
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Date: 2012-10-22 04:07 am (UTC)It might be the man who lives in the shadows but he doesn't want to get put away and he runs inside.
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Date: 2012-10-22 04:18 am (UTC)The lights are still low. Ship's night low-going to bed low-nobody bothered to turn up the settings or put a penny in the meter low. But the figure on the bed isn't sleeping.
He might be dressed for bed, but he's--
There's something running down his face. It's not coming from his nose, and it's too dark to be tears. It might be tinted red, but blood never looked or moved quite like that.
His mouth is open. He's dragging in frantic, whistling gasps, but they're clearly not getting him much. His lips are turning purple.
His fingernails are barely visible in the low light, but they're going blue.
Something in the shadows clicks.
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Date: 2012-10-22 04:21 am (UTC)"I'll just talk to your son and find out what's really going on. Children trust me, Mrs. Xavier."
It's not safe out there either and he closes his eyes to focus, whispering, "Be safe now, be safe now. This is my dream, I'm making you safe."
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Date: 2012-10-22 04:29 am (UTC)The light that sears through the suddenly deepened darkness in the next second is plenty bad on closed eyelids, we imagine. It's directional, from the near blackness remaining everywhere else, and it glares like a spotlight.
That's not just one something clicking now, either. It's multiple, a constant, patternless clatter of clickclickclick clickclickclick click clickclick.
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Date: 2012-10-22 04:32 am (UTC)He starts backing up without opening his eyes, desperately trying to change the dream.
Outside he bumps into a solid bulk of a person who says, "Now, just come with me. Nothing to be worried about."
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Date: 2012-10-23 12:40 am (UTC)The floor isn't rumbling with the action of engines anymore. It might even feel grassy.
changed. In lots of ways.
What's more, it's tilting underfoot.
You've done well. You all have.
Somewhere not terribly far away, somebody almost shouts.
"Will, please!"
Charles might know that voice. Then again, he's never heard her speak above normal conversational volume.
That light's still glaring down on something. There's the hiss of escaping atmosphere in the background now, but whatever's been clicking hasn't stopped.
Click clickclick clickclick clickclickclick click.
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Date: 2012-10-23 12:42 am (UTC)As he runs, he gets to his proper age and yells out, "No falling apart!"
It's partly to the dream but mainly to himself.
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Date: 2012-10-23 01:45 am (UTC)There are willow branches in the shadows.
There are
clickclick click click clickclick click click
alien shapes in the shadows. One of them is tall and thin. The others are not.
The hiss of escaping atmosphere is getting louder, and if it takes a little longer for a moving foot to regain purchase on the earth--well. Failing gravity will do that.
Someone's blasted a meter-wide circle and X into the grass. It's charred at the edges, weeping ground water and mud.
That spotlight's straight ahead, and it's glaring off something metal. Something table-shaped. Something with a swing arm at its midpoint.
And a figure pinned to its surface.
click click clickclickclick click clickclick
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Date: 2012-10-23 01:50 am (UTC)The figures are pressing in on him and he can feel the world trembling, but he can do this.
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Date: 2012-10-23 02:02 am (UTC)The blade has a jagged edge.
click clickclick click clickclick clickclickclickclick
The alien things clattering and clicking in the shadows might not be familiar, but Charles may well recognize the person in the spotlight's glare. He's met her before, after all.
Her eyes are open.
She looks sick-terrified-dazed-revolted-furious.
Something tall is looming at the table's head.
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Date: 2012-10-23 02:04 am (UTC)Reality doesn't matter, someone is trapped and they're going to change her, they can't.
He tries to find out how to get her away, there has to be a way.
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Date: 2012-10-23 02:15 am (UTC)we are being boarded
with the sound and sensation of a tractor beam latching onto a starship's hull.
The ground vibrates with it, vibrates out of time, and somewhere down a corridor--since when were there hallways again? Since when were they back inside?--something explodes in a blast of arcing energy. A figure falls with a gurgle at the foot of the console, disappearing amid a nest of lashing willow branches.
Or are those tentacles?
Sariel's on her feet, nightgown blood-streaked and legs bare below the ankles. The table and associated instruments are nowhere to be seen.
The ship lurches again, turns her first step into a stumble.
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Date: 2012-10-23 02:18 am (UTC)This place isn't safe, they have to find another, somewhere.
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Date: 2012-10-23 02:29 am (UTC)Or maybe it's emphasizing Charles's.
The shadows are still clicking. Dreams can be influenced from multiple directions, after all. A dreamer doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Speaking of vacuum. The view from the nearest porthole is pitch black, infinite.
Utterly starless.
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Date: 2012-10-23 02:32 am (UTC)"Yes, your station. We need to be safe."
He doesn't want to look around, everything will change again if he does that.
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Date: 2012-10-23 02:41 am (UTC)The floor vibrates again, rattles with the force of something striking a distant portion of the ship, and now even the unusually low lighting's flickering.
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Date: 2012-10-23 02:43 am (UTC)"To your station, please."
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Date: 2012-10-23 02:56 am (UTC)Somebody's scratched a circle and X symbol into the comm panel she heads towards. "Here," she says, and raises a hand to the terminal. "we'll go this way."
One second. Two. Something beeps. Something else chirps. "I can't remember how to enter the coordinates," she says, sounding somewhere between sheepish and a sort of let's-get-it-over-with candor.
And if that's not history repeating itself, what is?
A shape looms a short distance down the corridor, ghosting out of the doorway to a set of quarters. The wide open, yawning doorway to a set of quarters.
The shape is tall and thin, and wreathed in branches.
Wreathed in tentacles.
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Date: 2012-10-23 03:01 am (UTC)The console doesn't make sense, it looks like something from the movies. Maybe if he focuses then he can do something more.
He rests his hand on his head and focuses, exerting every bit of his remaining control to get them out somehow.
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Date: 2012-10-23 03:17 am (UTC)Dreams can be influenced.
They hit ground in a spray of sand. The sky is intensely blue above them, and somewhere out of sight beyond a line of local trees, the ocean hisses to itself.
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Date: 2012-10-23 03:24 am (UTC)Clouds cluster in the blue sky and he stares up as he can feel everything shudder. He doesn't know what's real.
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Date: 2012-10-23 03:40 am (UTC)Sariel's still on her feet, still in her blood-streaked nightgown, still barefoot in the sand.
Or is it snow?
There's a shape in one of those clouds, or rather, a shape forming out of one of those clouds.
It's a circle, and little by little, wisps of--that's too gray to be true cloud, it looks like fog, are crossing it slantwise.
Crossing it in the shape of an X.
The surf is still pounding against the shore. Or is that snow hissing against a battered landscape, or the sound atmosphere makes when it streams out a breached compartment into nothing?
One of those local trees is a willow. Its branches are waving.
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Date: 2012-10-23 03:42 am (UTC)He says to the sky, he doesn't have much left and feels like he's coming apart.
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Date: 2012-10-23 04:05 am (UTC)The Belgian snow is thrown into their faces, not muffling the rattle of gunfire in the air any more than it hides the unbroken rosary lying in a red-tinted drift at their feet.
A star looms larger than life on the Enterprise's viewscreen, and it's looming all the more with time.
A sword whistles through the air of Sherwood forest, and a figure without a face crows about capturing a prize for his lord.
The Milliways grounds are soaked with multicolored blood, and gravity and atmosphere are tangibly failing, air streaming away as the world tilts, lightens, drains away toward the end.
Alien language crackles through the darkness, a near-constant, ever-changing series of clickclickclick clickclickclick click clickclick, while a metal swing arm angles closer, the jagged-edged blade at its end brought into vivid relief by the blinding spotlight above the table.
A figure with too many limbs and no face at all blossoms out of nothing.
He's holding a longsword.
He's holding a blade with a jagged edge.
He's not holding anything at all.
one two following you
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Date: 2012-10-23 04:15 am (UTC)There was too much at once, this could be another part of the dream. He turns on the light and stares up as he tries to focus on reality.
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Date: 2012-10-23 04:32 am (UTC)There's a piece of old-fashioned paper clutched in her hand, and an equally antique pen rolling across her floor.
The paper contains a single freehand sketch of a circle crossed with an X. She knows that style of drawing.
It's her own.
The clocks in the bar proper read 3:33 A.M.