strove: (they say bacon is the best)
thanks clarke ([personal profile] strove) wrote in [community profile] meadowlarklogs2019-10-07 01:20 pm

[open log] i don't care about the mess you made

WHO: Clarke Griffin, Riku, and Goro Akechi + anyone who wants to do some dreams or other stuff
WHERE: Dreams, New Amsterdam.
WHEN: Month of January IC!
WHAT: Dreams, memory shares, etc. General open log things.
NOTES OR WARNINGS: Mentions of suicide and suicidal ideation for Akechi and Clarke (respectively).

[Riku, Clarke, and Akechi couldn't be more different on the surface—but when it comes to dreams, to the control of the mind and the actions they take, the similarities come together. Oddly enough, each of them has some experience over this space. Riku, through being a Dreameater. Clarke, through Josephine taking over her body and through having to fight back against the sociopathic scientist. And Akechi through the metaverse, having to traverse it alone. That's not to say that they have special powers here: but control is something that will come more easily, as will lucidity.

Of course, thematically they're different:]


riku: mistakes of the past, worries of the present

[These days, Riku is more or less at peace with himself. Once, his dreams were mercurial and lacked control. They showed his worry about strength. Power. And at times, Darkness—the Darkness that reigned over his life, that acted as a threat. These days, that Darkness is as much a part of him as anything: trapped in his heart, a constant in motion. A part of who he is.

But there are themes and motifs that reoccur. Friends fading away. The danger of thinking too much, even if the thoughts don't string together. A friend slipping, falling into a wave of Darkness. More recently: images of his home falling apart, of New Amsterdam falling to the same ruin, crashed into by a wave of dangerous Darkness.

And of friends dying. Of not being able to do enough. Of the struggle of having to accept that they will do as they do, even if he can't do nothing. His hands always tied, forced to be idle, passive. Accepting that, too.

There is always a push for logic against even the most irrational of thoughts. Always.]


clarke: guilt, the lives she's taken, a peaceful interlude

[Many of Clarke's dreams take place separate from what would be her mindscape. Her dreams are of green: sprawling trees with a beautiful, forested canopy. A bright sun overhead, though sometimes there are two. But in the horizon, there may or may not be ruin: ruins of a city that managed to come together in the aftermath of an apocalypse, or ruins of a world, covered in dirt and sand, and strange creatures that burrow into the ground and can dig into someone's skin. She doesn't dream of those creatures, not often.

When she can, Clarke dreams of what could be: a life in this area of rich, fertile environment. A time with her daughter, her mother, her friends. Bellamy is there when he can be, but during times of strife, it seems she has a hard time facing him. (This Bellamy is older, with facial hair and a calmer expression. Like he knows to keep what he can inside.)

When there are people present, there is always a pressure. Of being boxed in, of being the one to find the solutions. Clarke always feels as if her answers are the wrong answers, and they show here. But there is no resentment toward the many, many people in her life: angry, making demands. Just an acceptance. Clarke doesn't feel as if they're wrong to ask so much of her. Besides, she put herself in that position to ask to make those decisions.

After all, she is a mother. A leader. But also: a tumor. A cancer. These days, Clarke doesn't let those thoughts creep up, but in dreams, who can say?]


akechi: wasted potential, what could have been

[Akechi doesn't dream of exact moments or of exact places: he dreams of the settings he likes, with drawn out, complicated scenarios where he's called upon to solve a problem. Solve any problem. Because he is someone who came into his power at an age when he was already embittered by the world, embroiled in hatred for everything around him. His mother committed suicide when he was young, and he was forced to be passed from home to home, a blemish upon his family and upon the world. An illegitimate child and a problem. Rather than choosing to overcome these notions, Akechi internalized them, took them to heart.

His dreams reflect this: colored often in blacks and reds, with Akechi moving alone, carrying every purpose that he believes that only he can accomplish. His dreams are a sign of how he deluded himself: believing that his long term plans would become something at some point.

He is extremely intelligent, and his dreams show it: with him trying to make logic out of nothing, out of the world around him. He seems to be at odds with it, caught between a sense of justice (inherently emotional) and a world out of order, one that's inevitably going to be that way no matter what.

If Akechi's gambit had paid off—if he had been aware that he was a part of a game with a gambit in motion—his view of the world would've taken hold. It would've fallen into disarray, granting control to a single deity because people are inherently messed up. At the heart of his dreams, this is a singular, notable truth. It's just one that's at odds with what Akechi really wants: to be praised, loved, and seen as less than a blemish and more that someone who can accomplish things. He just hasn't admitted as much to himself.]


ooc notes

[The general overview here is to give people an idea of what my characters' dreams would contain. This is an open log, and you can request a starter hitting on one of the notes above! I'll also be posting closed requested starters below. I'm also open to memory sharing or characters just catching up, though the former may need to come along organically (as none of my three know it's on the table).

If you'd like to discuss further, hit me up on plurk @ medieval or on discord at alison#8996.]
hierophante: (40)

[personal profile] hierophante 2019-10-18 05:32 pm (UTC)(link)
[The tilt of OA's head demonstrates that she's giving the question due consideration. It's deceptively simple. A metaphor is a figurative stand-in for something concrete, but concrete doesn't mean real. She's not entirely certain which Clarke means here. Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe they're just different angles of approach towards the same conclusion.]

I do. We're creatures in time; the stories we tell ourselves matter.

[She does believe that, viscerally. Reality is too strange, too complex, too mercurial to be defined in any real way beyond one's experience thereof. The senses lie to the brain which lies to itself, true. At the same time, all one can really experience is that lie -- does that not make it functionally true?

She doesn't bother trying to put these things to words, not yet. That would send them too far adrift too quickly.
]

Someone once suggested to me that dreams are our way of processing information we're not perceiving consciously. Subtle cues, things we maybe don't have the context or time or attention or energy to understand when we're awake. I think that's true, in a way. I think... the body has to know something before you can really understand it, and the body knows time, so it understands story.

[OA reaches out to rest her fingertips lightly against the door.]

I guess the question is, what is it that you're processing? Where does it come from, the world or you? Both? Why do you keep coming back here, and why is it different now?

[She turns her head to look back over her shoulder at Clarke. The previous questions were half-rhetorical -- she invites answers, but certainly isn't going to demand any.]

Does this feel right?

[A nod towards the door. This is Clarke's place -- it seems safe to assume they're operating within the logic of her dreams, not OA's. Just as well: OA believes some of her own to be prophecy.]
hierophante: (25)

[personal profile] hierophante 2019-10-22 03:45 am (UTC)(link)
I don't feel like any of this is mine, but that doesn't mean that it isn't, that I'm not affecting it.

[Even the city doesn't feel like hers, though there's a subtler flash of recognition: it looks closer to the world she recognises, her Earth of 2016. Skyscrapers menacing the skyline, people moving through the snarl of city streets oblivious to the high strangeness of the place, its lurking menace. It's wonderful, alive, terrifying. OA made the worst mistake of her life in a place like this.

Her eyes are wide with the memory, pain and fear commingling on her face before they give way to wonder, to slowly-dawning joy. She lets out a sharp breath, not quite a scoff, not quite a laugh. It's the wrong reaction to the memories this vision dredges up in her, but it's the honest one.

She turns to take Clarke in, as interested in the dreamer as in the dream, if the two can even be said to be separate entities.
]

It's like New York! Like how I... imagined New York, um... I went there once, but I never saw it.

[She squeezes her eyes shut and shakes her head. Seeing isn't relevant. She lived it.]

It was so alive, so many people, cars, everywhere. All going places. Nobody... stopped.

[Her voice trails off; she finds herself slipping back into the memory of that day beneath the statue, of running her fingers over the inscription on the pedestal. Letters she couldn't read, neither with eyes that couldn't see nor with fingertips that couldn't parse their forms, save just well enough to know that they were words.

She'd waited all day.

Nobody stopped.
]

There are different kinds of isolation, different ways to be alone. Is this another of yours?

[She seeks out eye contact, waiting until she has it to give a gentle nod of the head towards the doorway, the city beyond. One of her hands reaches into the space between them, moving as though to touch Clarke's own -- though she never makes contact, never really comes close before the hand falls back to her side. The meaning is clear enough all the same: Together?]
hierophante: (14)

[personal profile] hierophante 2019-10-24 01:19 am (UTC)(link)
[OA's breath catches as Clarke takes her hand, but she smiles, gentle in spite of the lurch of fear. Every time, the urge to pull away is fainter, easier to resist. The discomfort is less compelling, the relief no less profound -- there's guilt in that, but well-rationalized at this stage. She's allowed to take comfort where she can. Homer would want that. He'd want her to offer it where she can too.

That's the bulk of it, the swell of emotion that bleeds back through the bond: gratitude of her own, grief of her own, but most of all compassion. That hint of the depth of Clarke's own loss does not surprise her. She's not met anyone among the displaced who has never suffered it, and the mind sticks on emptiness. Dreams gather in the voids left by the absence of places and people well-loved. Besides, the Displaced are all adrift, waking and dreaming. To cling to one another is not a luxury, it's an imperative. All benefit.

It helps that the city -- of light, apparently -- is so thoroughly absorbing. As they emerge into it, OA tilts her head back to take in the towering buildings, the grayish cast of the sky. That soft wonder blossoms in her again, tempered by the regret that comes over her in response to Clarke's question. It's... complicated. Most things are. She could give a half-answer, brush it off, lie; none feel like the right answer. She's asked Clarke to confront herself in interrogating the meaning of the dream, the very least she can do is reciprocate.
]

I don't know, I... somewhere green, maybe. Somewhere with trees.

[A pause, a rush of longing. Regret. Waking, things might be different. Waking she could forgive herself. In dreams, though, she knows how this story goes.]

But I don't know that that's for me to want anymore. I think if there's a message here for me, it won't be found in the sun.

[A beat.]

Is there a subway?

[If they're sharing catastrophes, that's where hers will be found. She spares Clarke a glance as they walk, expression solemn.]

Though if we have a choice, maybe we should seek out happier things. Maybe that's the point of all of this.

[Is it to walk into the dark with a companion at one's side, or is it to pull one another out? Both? Neither?]
hierophante: (16)

[personal profile] hierophante 2019-10-25 03:19 am (UTC)(link)
It is. It's a wonderful dream to have.

[Longing here, even the vaguest hint of nagging jealousy. It's a difficult thing to come to terms with, and more difficult still to explain. OA takes in a breath as though to speak, hesitates, mulls the answer over.]

Maybe that's the wrong way to put it. Wanting isn't the problem; I...

[There's a palpable trepidation here, the gravity of something huge and heavy waiting just across some kind of threshold, threatening to spill out across OA's emotional landscape, run juggernaut wild through her psyche. Like any bull in any china shop, it can be gentled if approached from the right angle. She's trying to find that angle, trying to discern what best to carry with her when she does make that approach.

Her hand tightens almost imperceptibly around Clarke's as she draws in a deep breath.
]

I don't know, maybe part of me doesn't think that I deserve it, not when I haven't... helped the people I need to help, not when they can't be there with me.

[The memory is sharp, visceral, the bleedthrough unintentional:

Her fingers fall on the handle of the knife. She knows immediately what it is but she, sun-dazed and hungry, so hungry, her stomach roiling around emptiness, all she can think about is the smell of bread.

The world is dark. In the memory this is not alarming, because the world is always dark. There are shapes, flares of static and colour, synaesthetic reactions to sound -- the brain fills in for what the eyes do not see. Prairie Johnson is blind.

She turns to the cutting board and she hears the locks on the door ratchet shut off to her right, hears Hap turn and still as she pats her way across the cutting board and the knife skitters, metal on wood, when she bumps it. It belongs buried to the hilt in his chest. In another world maybe that's where she puts it. Instead her hands move on; she finds the loaf of bread, whole and unsliced and heartbreakingly fresh and she lifts it to her face to inhale its scent.

It is the loveliest thing in the world. It's normal.

Prairie takes up the knife, measures out a knuckle-length of bread, lines the blade up by touch and begins to slice. The process unfolds from her, automatic; she feels her face impassive, her sightless eyes staring straight ahead. As if in a trance, she finds the edge of the countertop with the backs of her hands, tracing and measuring its length in a graceful, practiced gesture. Always the backs of the hands, never the fingertips, especially with a blade about: she cannot risk losing any sensitivity in her fingertips. At home, reading is one of the only means of escape that she has, the only way she can move through the world as other people do.

There's chicken in the refrigerator; she finds it by scent, the greens by touch. Condiments, condensation pearling on the glass, wetting her fingertips. Inexorably, inevitably she carries herself through the motions. Her thoughts are bell-clear. Bread. Mustard. Greens. Chicken. Bread. Set the knife crossways, lined up by touch. Palm across. Press. Plate.

She holds it out to him and wonders why, wonders why she's doing this; all she wants is to eat and yet--

"Take the other half."

And yet--

"You won't eat because the others can't."

She says nothing.


OA is back here, in the dream, on the sidewalk. Here with Clarke. As far as these things can be measured, safe, unaware that her descent into the past may not have been undertaken in solitude.
]

Mostly, though, I don't think I can run away from it. The things underneath. The things I'd rather not see. I have to go into the dark. That's what living is: going into the dark, every moment. Bringing light to what you need in a day. We have to go through it to get out, and I think... I think that's where my answers are.
hierophante: (44)

[personal profile] hierophante 2019-10-26 12:33 am (UTC)(link)
[OA is accustomed to flashbacks, to lesser surges of memory, visceral and intense, but she's accustomed to their being hers. It washes over her before she can answer Clarke's questions and is severed just as quickly as the contact breaks, leaving her staring down at her own empty palm. Her eyes are wide, her lips parted in surprise -- and then her gaze flicks up to Clarke's face, seeking eye contact. There's something accusatory in her expression, just for a moment.

It was a fair exchange. Nothing was stolen that wasn't also given. She suspects, moreover, that neither of them meant it. Hurt replaces accusation. Hiding the wound helps no one -- OA doesn't bother to try. Instead she nods, silent confirmation of at least part of the statement.
]

I was blind. It's okay; I'm not ashamed of that.

[That isn't what hurt her. It's easy to admit to; for the majority of her life it was simply fact. It made her move through the world differently, perceive it differently. It made other people treat her differently, made some things more difficult, other things easier. It was a fact, a quality of life, one she sometimes even misses.

No, the real source of the wound was elsewhere in that memory. It aligns more closely with the one she'd been given in turn.
]

But that isn't why. I needed it more because I couldn't see it.

[It's nearly impossible to explain to anyone who hasn't lived it, but she'd tried once before, and she suspects the method she'd used then will resonate here, even if she has to use shorthand. What Clarke had... experienced, the memory she'd shared in, gave her another little insight: she'd heard Hap's voice. She'd heard the closing of the locks, felt the sinking of the gut in response to the sound. She'd known hunger, and fear. The memory OA had tasted in return proves she also knows imprisonment.

What she has to say next, she has to say without eye contact, with her gaze resolutely ahead. They've been raw together and it's been good, necessary, but that doesn't mean there isn't still room for distance. On the contrary: Clarke had released her hand. They've both strayed a little too far.
]

The first time you fall asleep in prison, you forget. You wake up a free woman. And then you remember that you're not. You lose your freedom many times before you finally believe it.

[She intones it more than says it, recites it as though they're words she's spoken before -- which they are. That doesn't make them any less true. What follows is entirely for Clarke's benefit, composed specifically for her:]

Seven years, he kept us under the ground. I only felt the sun on my skin for... moments. Ten seconds. Fifteen. Whenever he'd let me up, open the door for me. When you can see, lighting works. You can see it. You know when you're supposed to be awake, when you're supposed to be asleep. When you're blind, without the sun, without the wind, you can't feel time.

[A beat, and then:]

He found me in a subway station.
hierophante: (45)

[personal profile] hierophante 2019-10-26 02:16 am (UTC)(link)
[Some part of OA -- the part who still calls herself Prairie Johnson, desperately wilful and intransigent -- ruffles at the comment. The offense is short-lived, to say the least: Prairie is dead. Prairie died a long time ago. She lives now only as one of the assembly of ghosts haunting the OA's psyche.

Ultimately it's sound advice. OA ducks her head, nodding down at the ground and releasing a wry huff of laughter. They don't have to carry the tension of the moment either. That can be made better too.
]

I know. I'm not punishing myself.

[Her voice is light, earnest. Whatever they're coming to terms with now, it doesn't have to be awful. It isn't, not all of it. Hap crushed her, yes. He crushed her and he crushed the others and like coal they became diamonds.]

I don't think I have to go back there in order to find him. I think I have to go back there to find myself. I don't know; I don't know how to put it. I can't deny that it shaped me. Hap broke us; he... he killed us. We all died more times than I can count.

[She says it absolutely literally: we all died more times than I can count. She means it that way, too, though in failing to elaborate she's inviting Clarke to impose upon that statement whatever metaphor makes it more palatable. There are some mysteries that must be eased into, even in dreams.]

But we made us angels. We're more than he could ever imagine.

[The conviction in her voice is steely in a way she hasn't been before now, but it too fades, replaced easily by the concerns of the moment. When OA turns her head to take in Clarke's expression, she's smiling. It's a gentle expression, fond in spite of how brief their association has been.]

Thank you. For caring. People always want to know; they rarely care to try to understand.

[Another thoughtful pause; the distant chatter of passers-by filters through. Dream city, dream people. Do they know they're a function of the imagination? Do they know anything at all?]

Someone told me once that to exist is to survive unfair choices. She was right. What she didn't say is that it's still not wrong to be hurt by them.

[This time, she isn't speaking about herself.]
hierophante: (46)

[personal profile] hierophante 2019-10-27 05:27 am (UTC)(link)
[OA regards Clarke's open palm for a long few moments, surprised in spite of herself. Surprise, as it is wont to do, gives way to another of those little bouts of not-quite-laughter, just shy of a snort, and she reaches out to take the hand in her own, nodding her own signature to the truce. Not that they'd been at odds, exactly, but she had unintentionally done harm.

It's... nice. Nice taking refuge in touch. Easier in dreams -- OA's gut still lurches, but the strange logic of dreams soothes the body where it might otherwise flinch.
]

I admit I'm curious what you'd conjure for me, if that's even how this works.

[Wouldn't it be fascinating if it were? Intriguing and horrible all at once. Would Clarke's imagination be kind? Would it shield her from the ghosts that haunt her own psyche? Or, in the absence of detail, would it fill in details far worse than reality? She knows Hap's voice now, but not his face -- out of what monstrous visage might that voice come, should he make an appearance at all?]

I'm happy to try to lead someone through the dark. I'm good at that. I know how to get around in it.

[A brief surge of amusement precedes a chuckle. She's speaking metaphorically, but not strictly. The literal is also true.]

I don't think I'm here to lead other people into it.

[Not her own, anyway. She can encourage them to look into their own, to gaze tenderly upon their own darkness and to realise there's nothing there to fear, but she can't force that either. Or... wouldn't. It's a line she has to draw, one she isn't always able to prevent herself overstepping, but she reassures herself with the certainty that as long as she can see where the line ought to be, she isn't like him.]

The deeper I go, the more I'm going to... remember, and I'm not quite sure how that happened before, the... sharing. I'm sorry. I wish it had been a kinder one.

[In any case, it isn't a no, exactly. But if the city shifts and gentles and leads them into the green, OA isn't going to fight it. There's enough dark to wade through in her own dreams.

She gives Clarke's hand a gentle squeeze, aiming a smile in her direction, genuine warmth crinkling the corners of her eyes.
]

She did mean for me to understand, the woman who told me that, about surviving. She knew that to be wounded is to be given proof that you're living.

[The words themselves may be grim, but OA's tone isn't, and the emotions that begin to filter through the bond certainly aren't. On the contrary: she feels lightened. More than surviving.]

The secret is tenderness, I think. Staying open to it. Tenderness for yourself, too. For the places you come back to. Especially those.

[A sweeping gesture of her free hand: this place, the tower, the end of the world. The aches at which one worries like a tongue at a sore tooth.]

Your mind gave us this place for a reason; I don't know if we should ignore that.
hierophante: (18)

[personal profile] hierophante 2019-10-29 03:03 am (UTC)(link)
[OA picks up her pace obediently, by habit unruffled at being led. It strikes her that if anything it bothers her even less here and now than it ever did when she was blind, when people were prone to mistaking the exertion of control over her for an act of kindness. Her blindness had been an excuse to guide her, to infantilise, to patronise, to touch her without her solicitation.

This is different. It's undertaken willingly, for one. OA also doesn't get the impression that Clarke is ushering her along out of the assumption that it's something she needs. Strange, really, how accepting help hurts less the less necessary it might be. She has to wonder if that isn't some small part of why Clarke is holding back on sharing her memories of this place: some things that are difficult enough to bear alone are all the harder to show to others. Vulnerability can be excruciating.
]

Mm. Lotus eaters.

[There's a strange lurch of pain, of loss -- she'd said it without thinking. She remembers when the books had come, remembers Abel bringing them up to her room. Sounding the words out. It was a small mercy that he'd already left by the time she reached The Iliad, that name on the cover. Homer. This is an even older recollection: she'd read The Odyssey in high school, when she'd been an unwilling lotus eater in her own way, trying to exist in the world through the haze of antipsychotics.

She can still recall the shapes of those words, flowing under her hands. Homer's wine-dark sea. Her own fingertips brushing against those of rosy-fingered dawn. It feels like it happened to someone else.
]

I don't know, maybe it is turning away.

[She doesn't sound -- or feel -- certain of that, but she's not entirely sure how to put to words what she does think. For a time, then, a thoughtful silence. OA keeps easy pace with Clarke, gaze raking the façades of the buildings as they pass. Hollow, false, like a film set.]

Common ground sounds more like the other answer. Reaching out. Asking for help. I don't mean that you need it--

[The last sounds like an afterthought, a concession. OA doesn't think there's any shame in asking for help, but she knows how absolutely unfathomable that is to some people, through no fault of their own. She doesn't imagine Clarke is one of them, but in the interest of avoiding insult, she specifies.]

--I mean that the fact we can endure something on our own doesn't mean we have to. Maybe that is why we're here.

[A beat, and then, less to clarify the thought than to add to it:]

I can take it, if it would help you for someone to know.
hierophante: (19)

[personal profile] hierophante 2019-11-01 03:42 am (UTC)(link)
[OA has had the dubious benefit of time to think. Years of stagnation, of near-total isolation, with nothing to do but truth-telling. She'd had to put herself under the microscope. Survival had depended upon trust, upon transparency, upon being nothing more or less than what she was. It makes her ill-suited for the world. This world, any world. She's for other things.

Things like this, perhaps: like taking what she's given and finding something like understanding. Some things are difficult enough to acknowledge, much less speak aloud. OA can't ask for more. She does give Clarke's hand another gentle squeeze, shares her own sensation of loss, a sympathetic echo.
]

Someone--

[She catches herself. This should be a fair exchange.]

Homer.

[The flood of feeling says more than she could with words: love and loneliness, loss, yearning, anger, frustration, grief, the profoundest gratitude. Being without any of the others is like missing parts of herself, but this is particularly true of Homer.

All her memories of him are wrapped in hurtful context. She doesn't want to do him the disservice of giving too much, not yet. He deserves to be shared with joy, and so her own response is nearly as sparse: the face of a young man, staring down at her through a pane of glass speckled with condensation, his lips parted and his brow furrowed, eyes wide with hope, the tension of a moment of joyful revelation at the knowledge that for a moment they share only wordlessly: she is seeing Homer Roberts for the first time.

OA's chest tightens; she swallows the sensation away.
]

Homer used to say that knowledge is only a rumour until it lives in the body. You don't really know a thing until the body knows it. Love is easy; it's here.

[The hand not holding Clarke's comes up to indicate not just her heart but lower, the gut, the groin. It's a visceral thing.]

I don't think it easily houses goodbyes. We... we stick, like catching on thorns. We come back to these places -- in dreams, in memories. It's like... I don't know, like some part of us can't reconcile what the body knows and what it can't... stomach.

[A pause, low mourning -- for herself, for Clarke.]

Can I ask what kind of goodbye it was?

[There are farewells and farewells, deaths and deaths.]
hierophante: (02)

[personal profile] hierophante 2019-11-04 02:38 am (UTC)(link)
[Darkness falls like a blanket, like a shroud. OA finds strange comfort in it, in the street lights blinking on, reflecting off the impassive faces of the buildings in arcane constellations. It's a suitable place for the story, for the memory.

OA does not shy from death. It unfolds before her in Clarke's memory and what she feels is not repulsion or fear but recognition. Sad, yes. Lonely, yes. Familiar, though. An old friend. A thing of horror and potential. She sees it happening every day here, sometimes swiftly, sometimes protracted. She sits with the dying. She speaks to them, helps them grapple with inevitability, with the process, with the outcomes.

Sometimes she tells them a secret: that she is personally, intimately familiar with death.

As Clarke speaks, as she spins the tale, counted out by their footfalls, a tension begins to grow in her -- the tension of uncertainty, of knowing a choice lies before her. She knows what decision she'd make in a perfect world. None is.

The mention of a daughter drags her back from that introspective swamp. She glances sharply over at Clarke, who looks far too young to have a daughter, much less one of an age to be commanding anything. The surprise falls away to acceptance, to the beginnings of a decision.
]

She's with you.

[Quiet, certain.]

Every decision you made for her that lead you to now, everything she taught you about living, everything that changed you -- they're all still here, part of you.

[So they come to the city and night falls and they are drawn inexorably towards its darkened underbelly. OA feels a flush of guilt. There's something she should say, something she should share, but the very thought is mortifying. It's desperately private. She's spoken about it, but speaking leaves a room for abstraction that what she's about to offer will strip away.

But she has a daughter. That sways OA.
]

If it's death we're walking into, you should know: I can show you.

[She gives Clarke another look, absolutely solemn. Unearthly solemn. This is a great mystery, and it's one into which Clarke has to want to be inducted. OA herself had had no choice. She'd learned it young. It had shaped her, made her strange. She carries that strangeness now, wears it openly.

She can't force that on another person, but maybe... maybe walking into it knowing, with the distance of old memory, would make it easier to bear.
]

What it's like. What happens after. I remember everything. But you have to want it.
hierophante: (25)

[personal profile] hierophante 2019-11-08 01:50 am (UTC)(link)
[So be it. OA nods slowly, giving Clarke's hand a gentle squeeze.]

It's never pleasant, but you don't need to be afraid.

[Perhaps saying as much is unnecessary for Clarke's sake, but she feels a need to do so anyway, to restate it as much for herself as anyone else. There's a brief deliberation -- which to show? Not the last, that lonely, empty space. Not the first, foggy with the distance of a childhood long left behind. The forest, then. The time it all changed.

She tugs the threads of memory, slipping underneath as into water, allowing it to flow.

Prairie lurches through the forest, arms extended in front of her, crashing through the carpet of dead leaves. This truly is a desperate escape: a blind woman, lost and alone, without her cane. Without anything. No road. Just the smell of earth, the bark of the trees into which she collides, the fallen branches over which she stumbles. Just her heart hammering in her chest, the air burning in lungs unaccustomed to its briskness.

The air changes. An updraft, the smell is different. She doesn't need to see the precipice to know it's there, that it's close. Prairie toes forward a step, another step, ready for the ground to fall away, ready--

The blow falls from nowhere, a sharp blossoming of pain across the base of her skull, and then nothing. Less than nothing. Less still than that. It happens mercifully fast, far too quickly to truly register.

When she comes to on a blanket of moss, all is light and colour, all is brighter than the memory of sky, greener than the memory of green. The landscape stretches on and on without trees, interrupted only by a little red hut. A bird flies by overhead, only it isn't a bird -- it's something whirring, robotic. Prairie watches it go. Watches. It's when she registers this without surprise, without any sensation but overwhelming calm, overwhelming peace, that she realises that for the second time in her life, she's dead.


The rest comes in bits and pieces, fragments of memory. OA is omitting sections, the most sensitive, the most strange.

Prairie pushes through the door of that little hut into space, into an endless expanse of swirling stars, tiny nebulae whirling past. She stands, walks, but there is no clear up and down, none of which frightens her. She has been here before. She knows: here, nothing is frightening.

She lays her head in Khatun's lap. The woman who had stolen Prairie's eyes welcomes her home like a daughter.

There is a door in space, and in that door a round window, like a porthole. Through it she sees her father, knows now and with finality that he truly is long dead. Khatun says that she can go to him, but if she does, she cannot return to the others. Khatun says that if she lives, she will never see him again. Not here, not anywhere. It isn't a fair choice. "To exist," Khatun intones, "is to survive unfair choices."

She says goodbye, the Russian heavy on her tongue, only half-familiar now. Papa doesn't hear her.

Prairie wakes. She wakes and opens her eyes and where once was blackness now there swims into painful focus the watchful eye of a camera; light filters in through the window, late afternoon, and she can see. She's alive. She carries Khatun's gift like a seed inside of her, a fluttering thing, promising freedom.


It fades; something of that peace lingers. OA remembers it well enough to feel it now, in spite of the tears she realises have come to her eyes.
]

It was different for all of us. Different... spaces, dimensions. Stories. People.

[A beat, and then:]

I think you'll see her again. I don't think your deal is like mine.
hierophante: (44)

[personal profile] hierophante 2019-11-15 03:25 am (UTC)(link)
[Clarke's certainty is gratifying. It isn't always harmless, isn't always gentle, but certainty is still preferable to the alternative. She cannot begin to guess at the repercussions of bringing more strangers to this world, but it would be a lie to say she wouldn't want to do the same in Clarke's shoes -- that she doesn't want to do the same, in a smaller, more personal way. She misses her own family desperately. If she could pluck them out of Hap's hands and bring them here, it would be difficult to resist, consequences be damned.

Either way, that certainty makes it easier to keep going, to move through this darkened dreamspace, into familiar, increasing sightlessness, interrupted by the scuffing of their shoes against the facsimile of pavement. The sound resonates in this strange space like that simple prayer resonates through OA's inner world.
]

Homer's was a hospital, he said. Somewhere by the ocean, with foghorns. Scott's was a film set.

[She chuckles softly, ducking her head. It sounds absurd, the afterlife as a hospital, as a film set. It makes more sense given a bit of further context:]

The NDEs were just a way of... traveling, of moving temporarily between spaces. Dimensions. There are other spaces outside of those, we thought. Entire lives we might have lived.

[A beat.]

And other ways to travel. Permanent ones. Death isn't final, and it's only one method.

[There's a low mournfulness, an unspoken understanding: even knowing this, she cannot make manifest what Clarke wants. There is a way to open the path, yes, but want and will are inherent in the process. Even if the movements work here, which is far from guaranteed, to the best of her knowledge, she could only help people leave this world, not draw anyone to it.

There's another sadness there too, older and darker and far more personal.
]

We were gonna have a garden. Homer and I, when we got out, when we found our perfect dimension. We thought there must be one, somewhere we could... live. Just live, with our hands in the dirt. I hope...

[A pause; she draws in a breath What she wants to say next must be felt, must be known in fullness, must be made true.]

I hope you get yours.
hierophante: (18)

[personal profile] hierophante 2019-11-27 03:47 am (UTC)(link)
[They're good words, apt words. OA nods, smiling -- easy affection for the wisdom and for its source, though there remains an undercurrent of remorse, regret for things outside of her control but still difficult to bear.]

Yeah. It was never going to be perfect for everybody, but we'd be free. At the time it sounded like the same thing, but we did spend more time talking about planting than harvesting.

[She looks down and away, for a moment unable to bear the sight of another person even in her periphery.]

We only traveled temporarily, only in death. That woman, Khatun -- the others met people like her, people who gave us... pieces, pieces of the puzzle, like words in a language. Five movements, at least five people. Executed perfectly and with perfect feeling, they could do things we could hardly imagine. The movements would be our wings. We'd get them all, and we'd learn them, and we'd escape.

[She huffs out a wry laugh; a pang of deep longing and regret passes between them.]

Sometimes we thought we were going mad. But the NDEs were real; we had proof. Hap had recordings. We had better. We'd lived it. We knew. We just... ran out of time. I didn't escape. There was no heroic rescue. I didn't save them. But I will.

[She presses her lips together, grim. It has the sound and feeling of a promise, a story she tells herself over and over so that in the telling it becomes real. There are worlds upon worlds, and time. They'll try again. She'll find them and they'll try again.]

I have them. All five. If you hold on to this memory and it still feels true in the sunlight, I can teach you. If you want to learn, find me.