This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?

[notathreat]

WHO: Ellie + OPEN (Grab me if you want a custom starter, even if they haven't interacted yet!)
WHERE: Dreamscape!
WHEN: September 22-25 2512
WHAT: Ellie's managed to keep y'all out of her head until now, but everything's got a breaking point.
NOTES OR WARNINGS: Violence, death, torture, body horror (zombie-type), violence towards a teenager.

Radio Nowhere

Comments

[notathreat]

Ellie knows that cracking sound, and worse, it's a voice she recognizes. She can just hope that it's her brain conjuring up a version of Clarke from her memories. That it's just one more way the nightmares are closing in, but she can't say for sure.

"Fuck," Ellie gasps, and tests her limbs, finding them sound. She can't see. She frees her flashlight and finds her vision spiderwebbed, her mask cracked completely across the eyes.

"Fuck," she says again, with feeling, and crawls free, making her way to Clarke's side. For now, the sounds are a ways off. Maybe they can hide.

"It's Ellie. Stay quiet. Where'd you hit?" She keeps her voice in a low whisper, letting the sounds cover the softness of their voices.

[strove]

"Leg. The right one." It's the same one that she once caught in a bear trap when she first met her daughter. (At the time, Madi was very much not her daughter.) But it's a scar she bears, a memory she has. Whether it influenced things here is hard to say.

She mimics Ellie's whisper. The familiarity here is apparent, but not as much. Most of the buildings were in ruins by time she went back to the ground, already taken over by nature. The biggest standing structure was Polis, and the rest belonged to Becca Franko. So she starts to piece this together. It's probably not something that belongs to her. Does it belong to Ellie? Hard to say.

After the Aerie and Zerzura, anything could be a dream or reality. Anything.

"I can heal." That's true in any reality. "But it needs to be set right." Which will hurt. Oh, it's really going to hurt.

[notathreat]

"Okay, I got you."

Ellie moves closer, fingers finding Clarke's shoulder and getting a sense of where she is. The light of Ellie's flashlight flickers, and she follow it down to the debris, using her other hand to get everything as clear as possible, off Clarke's injured leg.

Her mask is cracked all the way across. It doesn't look like she can see much.

"First we need to get the fuck out of here," she says, her voice barely a whisper. The screams sound again in the distance, riding that horrible line between human and not, croaking with something other.

"No matter what, keep your mask on. Got it?"

[strove]

"Yours is damaged." Clarke can't make out if the mask is too damaged to be helpful in here, given the limited light sources. But she's pointing out the obvious. Having been in Ellie's shoes—or thinking she's been there—she can't help but spot something like that. Then again, Clarke also gave up a radiation suit when she didn't know her radiation treatment (basically, to not feel the effects of it) would work.

In that way, it's one part suspicion, one part confusion. She can multitask.

She has questions, too. About the mask. What toxins might be in the air. She hasn't figured out that the spores are what they want to avoid. She's used to threats being difficult to spot in the air, but being a problem just the same.

"Should we patch it up before we move?" Clarke figures Ellie knows her leg will need a very temporary splint before she gets moving. In the meantime, it's her turn to worry. They can take stock of their surroundings once they get away from where they are. Ellie is worried enough to believe they need to do that, so she follows her lead, knowing that it's likely for the best.

[notathreat]

Ellie hesitates -- but the cracking of the visor over the mask is going to impede the fuck out of her vision, and she really needs it off. This is a dream, and Clarke doesn't understand the significance.

She reaches up, takes her mask off, and reaches down.

Ellie firmly grips the side of Clarke's mask, deadly fucking serious, to get her to look into her eyes.

"Spores can't hurt me," Ellie says. "But they will fucking kill you after one breath. They'll turn you into one of those things you hear coming, and I'll have to put you down. Don't take off your mask. You got me?"

The rest can wait. Even the oncoming infected. Even Clarke's leg. Ellie needs to make absolutely fucking sure she understands.

[strove]

She gets it.

Maybe if it was someone else, they wouldn't. But being immune to a threat, while people around her aren't? Clarke has been there. She saw someone who could have easily been the love of Raven's life destroyed because he wasn't immune. She doesn't know what those things are, but her head shifts ever so slightly in a nod. "I understand."

Whatever those things are, it sounds like they're shuffling closer. Clarke can bear a bit of pain to survive. She managed to drag her bear-trapped self back to her home so that she could stitch herself together. She'll manage, even with a bone that off-set.

"Let's go. I'll follow your lead." It's obvious that Ellie's familiar, that this is her own setting. And while Clarke could play a bit at teaching Ellie how to manage the threats in her dreams, she's not exactly thinking clearly enough for it. The pain itself is still very real, and the adrenaline over the announcement of a threat courses through her veins.

Clarke knows how to survive. Looking at Ellie, she's positive that she can get them both to that point.

[notathreat]

Relief flickers across Ellie's face. There's that much taken care of; she'd used to people not believing her. Tess, Joel, even Dina and Tommy. But until they watch her breathe spores without immediately coughing, gasping, turning into a wrecked and dying version of herself, nobody really and truly gets it.

Ellie nods and lets go of Clarke's mask.

"Do we deal with your leg here, or can we make it if you lean on me?"

Clarke says she can heal, but Ellie doesn't have any idea how fast.

[strove]

Clarke doesn't know the source of the relief. Is it that she's listening to Ellie? She assumes that that's what it is, because she doesn't know what any of this is. Not yet. But she'll figure it out. Her mind is already taking notes on the surroundings. The questions will come.

"Let's lean. I need proper light to set the bone." Feeling through it won't help. She doesn't have the right wherewithal to resist that much pain. Close, but not quite. "I trust you."

No, she doesn't know her well. But it's easy to say it. To reaffirm it. To some degree, it's a tiny, manipulative part of Clarke that wants to appeal to someone. She's just not fully aware of it.