meadowlarklogs | ( catch all )

[ if dreams can be summarized by feeling alone, a sense of isolation weighs this one down. it begins in a hallway, bland and militaristic in its construction, the sort of place that should have continuous activity. not only is there no one else in sight, but there are no sounds in the distance, no sense of people working just out of sight.

carolina feels out of place in civilian clothing, but something stops her from making herself more comfortable, from hiding away in her armour in this dream like she can't in the waking world. the one concession to comfort she allows herself is her hair: far longer than it is in new amsterdam, long and loose around her shoulders.

her head is up, her steps driving her forward with apparent confidence so she must be going somewhere. whether or not she finds that place right away (or at all) varies. but she's trying, looking for doors as she follows the unnaturally silent corridor along.

she doesn't seem to notice an interloper right away, the initial silence of the hallway muffling any noise they might make to announce their arrival. should anyone choose to stay, the curious can follow along quietly, just watching or eventually catching up to make their presence known. but carolina's attention is initially elsewhere:

A | one door takes her to a bunker, bathed in the red light of an emergency alert system. it takes her a moment to identify the room, her memory not initially filling in the appropriate blanks, but once she recognizes it, she's quick to turn back to the hallway.

B | a large automatic door takes her onto the ground level of a spacious training room, sometimes intact and bright, sometimes what she imagines it looks like after the ship it was aboard crashed: panels missing from the walls, sections of the floor buckled, lit by a hole high on one wall and a few weak pot lights still shining from the training floor.

C | one of the more benign doors takes her to an empty hotel room, plainly furnished and bathed in the glow of neon signs from outside the large window on the far side of the room. it's harmless, really, but Carolina still visibly tenses before she turns to leave.

D | another door leads to a dimly lit room, the chair in front of the desk empty and a video projected on the wall. it's perpetually looping home footage of a woman in military fatigues, muted. if she still thinks she's alone, Carolina lingers here, pauses before she crosses the room to the abandoned work station; on the desk sits a pistol and a pair of glasses. she reaches for the glasses, but stops herself before she can touch.

E | this time, the hallway ends abruptly, instead opening up into an alleyway in New Amsterdam. it's overgrown, next to buildings that have taken serious damage from the recent monster invasion. it's almost too normal and Carolina is palpably unnerved.

F | the lights don't come on in this room until Carolina and her guest have stepped inside. sometimes it's just eerily still, twelve unique suits of power armour frozen in the position their owners died in. other times, the edges of the room are filled with cameras and other equipment found on a movie set, although there's not a crew to be found. either way, the door behind her isn't opening again, so Carolina's going to have to cross the room to find another way out.

G | this small, airtight door doesn't really look like it should lead outside, but it does. outside and onto a snowy mountaintop, where whatever bubble of quiet that's been hanging over the dream pops. it's noisy out here, but it's all just wind, filling every silence, whipping her hair across her face, filling her vision with flurries. ]

( ooc: will match prose if you're more comfortable. also, feel free to chain a few options together or simply have your character catch up to carolina in the hall! all of these have the potential to get pretty dark, so if you have any concerns or want to plot out things going "i s2g this canon is technically a comedy" directions, lmk. we absolutely can! )

Hawke is getting so used to these moments that when she opens her eyes into it, she doesn't have those few moments of uncertainty. She simply sighs and rolls her eyes, waiting to see if she can recognize anyone in it. She thinks she sees someone heading into a door and the head looks familiar, so she follows her in.

"Oh good, it's you," she says once she recognizes Carolina. She doesn't notice her reaching for the glasses, instead she focuses her attention on the woman in the looping video. Hawke narrows her eyes. "It's a bit spooky, only silence. Is there a sound up button around here?" See, she's gotten so used to modern slang that she knows what to ask for and everything!

Before Carolina has a chance to be properly startled by someone joining her dream, Hawke speaks and puts her at ease. It's not a stranger, then, but one of the few people in New Amsterdam that Carolina has grown to genuinely consider a friend. If anyone's going to watch her subconscious haunt her with this room, she's glad it's Hawke.

"No buttons. This facility was mostly voice controlled, just a few terminals here and there," she says, looking back at Hawke to give her a soft, weary sort of smile. "But since this is a dream, I can probably just..."

Carolina closes her eyes as she talks, focusing on the memory of the video, of watching it when she was younger, a teenager who just wanted to feel close to one of her parents, who poured over every video of Allison she could find. That's better, she thinks, than thinking too much about the loop the Director had the video on in this room.

"— that thing down, you're going to make me late."

The video and the sound don't match up, at first, and even Carolina has to admit that that's not exactly a reassuring development. But as she watches, focuses, static fills in the gaps until the words meet up with the movement in the video.

"Don't worry, you'll see me again," the soldier in the video promises and that tired, sad smile of Carolina's is back.

She doesn't exactly need to breathe in a dream, but she still takes a deep breath before she offers, "This was my mother."

"Voice-controlled, how fancy." Hawke is only slightly on top of tech. Barely. Limping along. But she's fairly comfortable in her ignorance too. Some things just are. Carolina seems to be able to control her dream so Hawke steps over to her friend, watching this new version. The strangeness of sound and video not syncing up perfectly is odd, but she can still get the gist of it.

She also picks up pretty quickly that this is someone important to Carolina before she speaks. There's something loving about the memory, the type of thing someone has remembered many times. Hawke flinches when she says you'll see me again, because yeah, obviously if she came back someone would be playing this clip over and over. Poor thing.

It becomes much more poor thing when Carolina gives context and Hawke's eyes move to her quickly, startled. "Shite, I'm sorry." Because she's already guessed this story didn't end well. They might be from very different worlds with tech, but they aren't when it comes to tragedy.

They're friends, in Hawke's eyes, which is why she doesn't hesitate to reach over and place a gentle hand on her shoulder. "She's lovely. She also looks like she could kick some arse."

As much as Carolina likes to pretend she dislikes any invasion of her personal space, Hawke has earned enough trust and affection for her to drop the act and give her friend a grateful little smile. The hand on her shoulder is nice, even if it's just in a dream. Reassuring.

"Right on both counts," Carolina says softly, obviously proud of that. Proud of Allison, proud to be her daughter. Hawke's told Carolina about her own mother before, so it feels fair to return the favour. "I grew up planning to enlist, so I could be like her."

And she's never been quite sure if she got there, if she ever became a person that Allison would be proud to call a daughter.

"You know, it's funny," she continues, in a tone that says that the following observation isn't really funny at all. "I can't remember where I was when my father was recording this. I had breakfast with my parents, my mother hugged me and said she'd see me in a few months and then... I went to school or to play with a friend or something. It doesn't really matter, I know that, but I still wish I could remember."

They've reached this place of comfort with each other without intending it, but that's the best kind of friendship for Hawke. She tends to slide her way into someone's life and heart and then burrow in, stay there forever. Carolina reminds her of Aveline, but she's a lot easier to talk to.

She nods, understanding well how a child would want to follow in a parent's footsteps. Bethany was like that with their father, but Hawke was the warrior in their family. And Carver followed her. She'll always regret that. But this isn't about her, this is about Carolina, and therefore the redhead gets her full attention.

"You think that these significant moments would feel significant when they happen, but most of the time, they're average. Every day shite." She gets it, she really does. Memories want to crystalize, but it doesn't work by sheer will power. Hawke keeps the hand on her shoulder since she doesn't seem to mind.

"It matters," she says gently, "because if that's the last time you saw her, you want to remember every detail, yeah? But brains don't work that way." Hawke half-smiles. "They're real arseholes that way."

"They are, aren't they?"

For all the crystal clear memories Carolina has, it bothers her that she doesn't know what happened after she hugged her mother for the last time. But Hawke's right: some things are only significant in hindsight, some last times can't be confirmed as the last for months or years.

"And to give myself a little bit of a break, six year olds aren't known for their attentiveness," Carolina says, tone dry, her weight shifting toward Hawke to gently bump her elbow against the other woman's side. It's gratitude not just for the gesture of affection, but for the space to talk about this.

"I try not to think about her too much," she continues, her smile a wistful one as she watches the footage loop again. It's so much easier, so much nicer to make this dream about her mother and not about the room they're in at all. "Obviously, my subconscious thought this needed to come up. Brains being shitty again, I guess."

"You were only six? I have to tell you, I barely remember anything from that age." Hawke remembers vague things like her father, the birth of her siblings, them always moving and trying to keep under the radar so no one gets suspicious about the apostate mage. Her memories come more in snatches, like Bethany's first word or Carver's insistence on pulling her hair and laughing about it.

It's a shame though, that she lost her mother that young because it meant memories were gaps and difficult to grasp. She smiles when Carolina bumps her and bumps her back. She'd get along so well with her gang, she just knew it.

Hawke's attention moves back to the footage. "Or maybe you do want to occasionally think about her, and your brain's encouraging it. Just for now." It is a wistful and sad memory, but sometimes those have to be embraced. The mind is a troublesome thing, otherwise she wouldn't be caught forever in her mistakes in her own dreams.

"That being said, this is not your room, I take it. If you didn't want to be stuck on her." And this loop is in no way a healthy option for someone who wants to move on. "Not to poke at a sore, mind you."

[ It's actually a bit surprising to Drake, once he sees Carolina, that this is her dream and therefore likely her world. He'd expected something more... futuristic looking? Their armor looks like something out of a scifi movie, but the couch could be from his first apartment. He can recognize this as a hotel, and can also tell she's uncomfortable here for some reason.

He should probably wait and see if anything happens, but she's leaving -- will he be stuck in here without her? Should be follow? The rules aren't defined, even for someone as used to this phenomenon as him.

Finally he calls to her, curious and a little concerned. The last dream of hers he ended up in was pretty terrible, after all. ]

Carolina? Where are we?

[ carolina doesn't notice drake until he actually addresses her, so there's a flicker of surprise on her features before she can catch herself. but she stops, turns to face him, respects drake enough to give him a clear answer. ]

A long-stay hotel on Chorus. [ a planet she's mentioned enough for drake to know she's spent a great deal of time there. ] This is where I was living, before we turned up at that music festival.

[ it's very clearly a living space for one person, so she'd been there alone. ]

Oh...

[ It must have been while Wash was recovering. Was he still in the hospital? Drake looks around and it's clearly a single space, not enough room for two. That must have been an adjustment for her, he thinks. ]

By yourself?

[ she nods, expression furrowed as she steps past him to go to the window. the view directly outside of it is clear, but if she turns her head in either direction, her memory has filled the rest of the block with vague shadows and darkness. ]

The Reds and Blues were away, having their adventures, and Wash was in the hospital. And then his own place. [ which made her feel like she had to visit less than she did at the hospital, and that made her ache. ] It... wasn't so bad. I knew some people who lived nearby.

[ The place feels cold, somehow. Sterile. Like it's not hers, which he supposes it isn't, but... he's gotten so used to seeing Carolina around her people, it's hard to imagine her on her own as she is now. As she described herself how she used to be, sure, but now this woman. ]

Still. That must have been lonely.

Mm, it was.

[ and drake's one of very few people she could admit that to. he knows her well enough, knows enough about how close she is to her people. ]

It always struck me as funny that a city was quieter than sharing bases with the guys, most nights. Less than a dozen idiots, louder than a whole capital city.

Having met a handful of them, I'm not surprised at that.

[ He smiles at her, both thinking of her friends and to acknowledge that she shared something private with him. ]

I'm sure if you put the whole city in one base it'd be pretty chaotic, too, though. Tell me about the people nearby?

[ carolina shifts her weight, turns enough that drake can see the flicker of her appreciative little smile before she starts talking. ]

It was just a few of the soldiers who'd gotten particularly attached to my friends, our first visit to Chorus. I... didn't really bond to any of them, like the guys did. [ surprising no one, probably. bonding is hard. ] These two that really looked up to Tucker and Simmons eventually figured out that I'd tell stories about them if they actually got me to something social, so they'd invite me out. And then so would a few soldiers who lived in the apartment block next door, and a medic, on the next block.

[ she pauses, shaking her head, but it's more of an amused gesture than strictly negative. ]

They mostly made for incredibly annoying friends, but when Wash didn't need me, it was an excuse not to be alone. And I did genuinely like Jensen, she's clever, a sweet kid. Simmons having faith in her did a lot to help her grow into the person she is and I hope he's proud of that.

[ Drake listens to the explanation, smiling faintly at it and the way Carolina talks about the younger soldiers. She liked them all, he thinks, at least in a way. You don't keep going out with people that just annoy you, or just out of loneliness. He's glad she had them. ]

That sounds nice -- and like it might've started as them hoping you'd tell stories about the others, but they didn't have to keep inviting you all the time. They probably looked up to you a lot, too, as one of the leaders.

open dream (cw: isolation, death, ptsd, etc.)

HERE WE GO AGAIN - D lol

oh heck yeah

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my brain has returned to life

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