Nicholas Rush (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lottawork) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
applesaucedream2015-02-13 10:29 pm
lottawork) wrote in applesaucedream2015-02-13 10:29 pm
sound and fury drown my heart, every nerve is torn apart [open to multiple]
[warning: this dream deals with claustrophobia, hydrophobia/drowning, suicide ideation, mental invasion, alien abduction, and related medical squicks.]
where is the ship
Immediately Rush knows where he is, and the thought fills him with indescribable horror.
He would struggle but he can only drift without purchase, resist without means for resistance. He has no cognitive self-defense. His mind is flayed and open - they have stripped his neurological architecture bare and reassembled it with fascinated laziness, they have analyzed everything he is biologically, fundamentally, psychologically, they know his blood type and the sensation of a hammer slamming over his fingers in the steel mills of Glasgow and the disordered burst of sympathetic nervous overload that generates panic. They've shredded into his head, they've come shrieking into his silence; nothing can be kept in isolation as they eviscerate his subconscious, invade each molecule, unmake his construction, unbury his core, shear into what he cannot hide from them, intimately, with sleek, strategic tendrils of thought that are alien, malformed, wrong.
He is floating in a tank of ionized water in a spectrum of blue-silver-grays. He's kept nothing from them, save what they want to know most.
where is the ship
There is the weight of water pressing down and all around him, the dull tingle of cold against the bare skin of his neck, head, arms. The thing keeping him alive is wrapped around his face and rammed partially down his throat, a silver breathing apparatus clamped over his mouth, silencing him, muzzling him. He is floating in a tank of ionized water and wishing he could breathe the water, fill his lungs with blissful icy fluid and end the endless sequence of prolonged neural attacks. That language, their language, is high-pitched and chittering and utterly unintelligible, an irradiating aural torment that sluices into the layers of his brain tissue and strangles his dread into utter numbness, they will never allow him death, they will never allow him death, they will never allow him death.
He is floating in a tank of ionized water, freezing and alone and psychically paralyzed. One hand slams against the vitreous walls of the tank in frenzied, fruitless desperation, the distressingly impenetrable surface spread beneath his fingers. He hammers at his prison and wishes he could drown.
where is the ship
The water is ionized. The water is conductive. The water is transparent, and so is the glass. A silvered flare of bubbles flutters upward, darting between the tubes trailing out from the subcutaneous entry points beneath his clavicle. Every movement is hopelessly inhibited by the thickness of water resistance, pulling at his clothes and his hair as they fan out in slow drifts. He remembers breaking out. He remembers his prison shattering under application of blunt force and pressure, and he remembers tearing away the mess of tubing and the breathing mechanism and the telepathic entry point stapled to his head, and he remembers wriggling free, getting on a ship, getting out. He remembers this. He remembers it. He remembers Manhattan. It must have happened. It must have. So much has elapsed since then, that cannot all have possibly been manufactured. Unless he has simply never left, and they courteously let him believe otherwise. They could have distorted his perception of that. They're capable of it.
He breathes through a breathing apparatus in a tank of ionized water and his only defense is his hatred of his captors.
where is the ship
They leave him in aching silence. Time drags. It's impossible to tell its passing, until Rush can finally reconstruct his bearings, his physical position, his own name. He is floating in a tank of ionized water, and this time he has no escape. If he were allowed an open mouth, he would howl. If he could thrash at his confinement, he would slam himself into the clear walls with claustrophobic ferocity. All he can do, now, is knock an open hand feebly against the glass and wait for dissolution.
[ooc: this is a recurring nightmare for Rush, so just pick a date if you tag in for dream-y funtimes. For context: Rush has been kept on an alien ship for some time and he sure would like to get off that wild ride. The aliens that took him look like this - cw for unnaturally tall or skinny things - and he's being held in a thingy that looks like this - cw for people jars.]
where is the ship
Immediately Rush knows where he is, and the thought fills him with indescribable horror.
He would struggle but he can only drift without purchase, resist without means for resistance. He has no cognitive self-defense. His mind is flayed and open - they have stripped his neurological architecture bare and reassembled it with fascinated laziness, they have analyzed everything he is biologically, fundamentally, psychologically, they know his blood type and the sensation of a hammer slamming over his fingers in the steel mills of Glasgow and the disordered burst of sympathetic nervous overload that generates panic. They've shredded into his head, they've come shrieking into his silence; nothing can be kept in isolation as they eviscerate his subconscious, invade each molecule, unmake his construction, unbury his core, shear into what he cannot hide from them, intimately, with sleek, strategic tendrils of thought that are alien, malformed, wrong.
He is floating in a tank of ionized water in a spectrum of blue-silver-grays. He's kept nothing from them, save what they want to know most.
where is the ship
There is the weight of water pressing down and all around him, the dull tingle of cold against the bare skin of his neck, head, arms. The thing keeping him alive is wrapped around his face and rammed partially down his throat, a silver breathing apparatus clamped over his mouth, silencing him, muzzling him. He is floating in a tank of ionized water and wishing he could breathe the water, fill his lungs with blissful icy fluid and end the endless sequence of prolonged neural attacks. That language, their language, is high-pitched and chittering and utterly unintelligible, an irradiating aural torment that sluices into the layers of his brain tissue and strangles his dread into utter numbness, they will never allow him death, they will never allow him death, they will never allow him death.
He is floating in a tank of ionized water, freezing and alone and psychically paralyzed. One hand slams against the vitreous walls of the tank in frenzied, fruitless desperation, the distressingly impenetrable surface spread beneath his fingers. He hammers at his prison and wishes he could drown.
where is the ship
The water is ionized. The water is conductive. The water is transparent, and so is the glass. A silvered flare of bubbles flutters upward, darting between the tubes trailing out from the subcutaneous entry points beneath his clavicle. Every movement is hopelessly inhibited by the thickness of water resistance, pulling at his clothes and his hair as they fan out in slow drifts. He remembers breaking out. He remembers his prison shattering under application of blunt force and pressure, and he remembers tearing away the mess of tubing and the breathing mechanism and the telepathic entry point stapled to his head, and he remembers wriggling free, getting on a ship, getting out. He remembers this. He remembers it. He remembers Manhattan. It must have happened. It must have. So much has elapsed since then, that cannot all have possibly been manufactured. Unless he has simply never left, and they courteously let him believe otherwise. They could have distorted his perception of that. They're capable of it.
He breathes through a breathing apparatus in a tank of ionized water and his only defense is his hatred of his captors.
where is the ship
They leave him in aching silence. Time drags. It's impossible to tell its passing, until Rush can finally reconstruct his bearings, his physical position, his own name. He is floating in a tank of ionized water, and this time he has no escape. If he were allowed an open mouth, he would howl. If he could thrash at his confinement, he would slam himself into the clear walls with claustrophobic ferocity. All he can do, now, is knock an open hand feebly against the glass and wait for dissolution.
[ooc: this is a recurring nightmare for Rush, so just pick a date if you tag in for dream-y funtimes. For context: Rush has been kept on an alien ship for some time and he sure would like to get off that wild ride. The aliens that took him look like this - cw for unnaturally tall or skinny things - and he's being held in a thingy that looks like this - cw for people jars.]
mmmorning August 24?
Rush's mind generally seems to be in a near constant state of stress, of frustration or aggravation or anxiety, judging by the few times she's seen it. But this is so much worse than that. This is sheer horror and fear and agony radiating hotly, searingly into the telepathic current and she's worried immediately. There are far too many creatures who seek to attack people in their dreams here, and she's not going to let Rush be hurt in her presence a second time.
She touches his mind cautiously, first of all taking a look around for any outside influence. As she does so she projects her human form doing the same, a slow turn on the spot to scan the scene. He is obviously dreaming about a ship, architecture and technology not resembling anything she's ever seen from humanity in her own universe. Could this be his ship, the one she would have so liked to meet? No, a moment later she has sifted through his roil of emotions and sees that this is profoundly alien and terrifying to him. At least she can't detect another mind, this is all his own pain.
She finishes her look around and faces Rush himself, trapped in a sort of semi-conscious stasis. It's not the sight of the contraption that dismays her so much as the feelings of stifling, blinding confinement and torturous helplessness. He doesn't need to be suffering any of that. Unfortunately she wasn't made to make precise changes in human minds outside of her translation function, so she can't easily brush all this aside and place him somewhere more pleasant. But she can very much encourage his mind to do so on its own.
The TARDIS steps up to the glass and places a hand where his is twitching desperately. When she speaks, her voice carries perfectly through the glass and the fluid. "Nicholas, you are dreaming. You don't need to be here." She spreads a calming sense of safety and wide open spaces over his panic, complete and tightly knit as a blanket, seeking to quell his terror like flames. "You are not trapped."
sounds good to me!
Is he no longer capable of conscious thought. Has his mind become so desperate for any form of release, regardless of whether it truly exists, that it needed to fabricate the illusion of calm or escape or freedom or breath simply so that it may remain decently, marginally, somewhat workable?
Is this yet another foreign intrusion or his only means for escape, however figurative, and how does one differentiate.
It is not until he can reduce his state of terror enough to analyze the voice that he understands it, accepts it, hears it and recognizes it and the vast mental strain of supporting his head in its perpetual condition of horrified panic breaks in utter relief. He may question the reliability of this projection, if it is a projection, and whether this is truly a separate individual or something created out of his own head, but Rush doubts he could reproduce the TARDIS with all her capabilities with any accuracy, and he doubts they would have the understanding of her to do so either.
His hand stills against the glass. It is difficult to re-regularize breathing through an apparatus, where oxygen is already regulated and given in constant measurements, enough to keep him alive, but he allows the projected sensation of safety to drown away his overpowering fear of this confinement. It occurs to him that he has every reason to doubt that any of this exists in reality - but he can no longer find it within him to care. Even illusory release is a form of release.
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Releasing him from his perceived prison might also help. He is too worn out and passive to break out on his own, not like Johnny did when she'd soothed his nightmare, but his weakness means the setting is a little more easily suggestible than when he had a tight utterly panicked hold on it. She doesn't bother with the control panel behind her, doesn't concern herself much with the internal consistency of this dream, instead carefully imposes a single thought; there is simply no more water. Evaporated, or drained, or whatever he expects of this context, but it is gone and he is dry and the glass slides out of the way with a hiss.
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He is not panicking and must remind himself he is not panicking, but before he has completed that automatic mental affirmation it comes to his attention that he is not panicking, that his abused physiology has not responded in the typical fashion and is maintaining some precarious measure of calm, miraculously.
Rush sags against the wall in paralyzed confusion, taking note of his nervous system's immediate, shivering response to the possibly not-truly-existent temperature, before finally bringing his searching gaze to rest on the shape he now knows he recognizes.
"Why did you do that?" Fear is clouded by genuine perplexity, alarm over why the TARDIS is here and why she may have come to help him. Do they know she is here and what might they do if they found out?
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Why wouldn't she do that? What an odd question and she frowns mildly, but speaks with nothing but patience. "I want to help. And there is really no need to be afraid, Nicholas. You're dreaming. You are not on this ship." Aside from not wanting him to suffer, he was hurt before because of her mistake and she hates it; she should not have let that leech-like creature inside. She'd failed to protect those under her care, and she refuses to let him be hurt again, even if it's just his own mind doing the hurting.
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"This is -" Speaking comes with some difficulty - if this is not truly real his teeth should not be chattering but no amount of repeated insistence of the dream's nature seems to have any profound effect on this - "this isn't - it feels -"
He shakes his head, a tiny, jerking expression of his pained frustration with the apparently broken methodology of his own mind. The TARDIS, obviously, has a grasp of the psychical nature of things superior to his own, or to any human's. He trusts this evaluation, far more than he trusts the diametrically opposed conclusion his haptic input is screaming at him.
The floor beneath his feet trembles - perceptual error, Rush assumes, an unfortunate side effect to the disorientation of unexpected freedom from the fluid suspension of sensory deprivation. But the cold lighting in the ship flickers and the entire construct shakes, and this goes beyond standard dissociative sequelae.
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She sighs and nods in acknowledgement of his half-expressed objection, yes, she can see how it feels. The sudden destabilization of the setting doesn't help, and it's another spike of panic that she barely catches before it can spread. She of course stands unaffected by the tremors, but he was already unsteady on his feet to begin with and so scared. So she reaches out to grasp his arm and offer support, speaking with sympathy but firmly, "Don't mind any of this, you are not going to get hurt. I'd like to take you somewhere else, come along." She tugs gently at his arm, confident that the dream is more likely to change on the move than if they remain standing right next to his awful prison.
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He practically falls against the support she offers and holds to it despite the searing discomfort and he knows he must assume she is real but the possibility that she may not be terrifies him so completely that it has grown difficult to acquiesce to the command. He stumbles. His feet drag. He shivers, and the floor is growing ever more unstable.
"They get in your head," he whispers, whether by explanation or warning or utter non sequitur he cannot say, and he fixes her with a desperate, wild look. "Don't let them."
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"If they were really here, they would find me quite impregnable and very unkind," she assures him grimly, radiating protectiveness. "And I would not allow them to invade you again. But they aren't, and I have never been to your universe, so how do you think I am here? You know connecting to another mind is possible while dreaming near the rift, we met in one of these before." Reason is what he needs, a straight line of logic out of this mess. The shaking and shivering must be distracting though, so she decides to stretch her reservations about manipulating his dreamscape just a little further and lets a sense of calm and warmth wash over him, the stability and quiet hum of her floors beneath his feet, something to help him think.
tw: dissociationnnnn and general unsettlingness
Fuck.
"Yes," breathes Rush, closing his eyes, accepting the protective flow and knowing its function and knowing his function and knowing his function is not in imminent danger of collapse. He is fine. He will live. The TARDIS is here. This is good. This is optimal. "I remember."
The TARDIS - would not be vulnerable to their telepathic efforts. She is something they cannot possibly -
- is she?
Is this relevant. Are they in any true danger.
No. This has been repeatedly confirmed.
Reset.
"We should go." The hall stretches to a set of points before and behind them and both directions are empty (currently), and should he be more concerned that they are empty (should they be) or should he be concerned that he is concerned that they are empty.
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For now she's happy to follow his suggestion and give him the opportunity to change the scenery himself. A mind like his isn't going to be walking down a nondescript corridor for long. He is a little steadier now, so she releases his arm and takes his hand resolutely, assuring a clear, secure point of contact with her. "Tell me more about your ship," she says as they walk, trying to redirect his focus as subtly as possible. "I would very much like to know what it was like."
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The question is innocuous on its own.
Unthinkable in context.
Rush stops, breathing abruptly catching into irregularity. No. No, he has already confirmed this, this is nothing he should be concerned about. Nothing.
"I - can't do that," he says, acutely, agonizingly aware of the abnormal cadence to the words, the tightening of his grip into hers, the subtle contracture of muscles. "I can't - it's what they want - wanted." If it is no longer relevant then it must not continue to terrify him.
Rationally. Logically. According to all laws. This was clarified previously.
"If they hear -"
The whisper of disturbingly thin, inhuman feet upon floors is purely a product of a mind that is overtaxed, overstressed, thrust into a mental recreation he is still struggling to obtain some measure of control over. It must be. They cannot exist here.
But he turns.
And he sees them.
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She squeezes his hand back reassuringly and turns to face his past tormentors by his side, though she sees nothing remarkable about them. Not that cruelty is ever outwardly visible. "They aren't real, Nicholas," she repeats steadfastly. "They can't hurt you, and if they could I would stop them. You are dreaming, and we were leaving." She turns back towards their ill-defined path and gives his hand an encouraging tug. "I will tell you about myself, then, if you come along. You have seen so little of me yet."
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What happens when they draw close.
They don't appear to be exerting any undue effort to keep up. Is this his audience, then? Are they observing him? He remembers Manhattan, he remembers -
Unless he never was in Manhattan.
Oh god. Oh fuck. Reassess. Reset. Align. Mental recreation. Recollection, reconstruction from memory. Has he ever been to Manhattan? Is all this nothing more than a simulated construct and how can he ever be sure it is not when they are continuing to follow him with their hard-edged whispering, screeching language shearing unbearably through every thought and conclusion and submerging all he knows and is in doubt?
The TARDIS. He has to remember. The TARDIS. They could not have created her. They could not have inspired him to create her. Rush's mind is so constrained by biological necessity, and they could not have formed her from his own memory, or imagination, or anything. He has to remember.
"Are we safe?" Of course they are.
Of course they're not. Everything exists in opposition. "From them?"no subject
"My planet of origin was called Gallifrey," she begins, trying to think of facts about herself that will be interesting enough to draw in his focus. "I was grown and technologically augmented by the Time Lords there. I travel Time via the time vortex, a plane of reality superimposed upon normal spacetime which allows me to materialize at any point therein with no ill effects on the stability of continuity." That should be quite impressive, even if recalling it fills her with worn out despair and longing. "The vortex is beautiful and I miss it," she sighs. "I'm blind here, I cannot connect to this universe properly."
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The TARDIS.
What she is saying is utterly fascinating, it is precisely what he has always wanted to hear, regarding her capabilities of traversing time and how it was achieved. She was able to enter a vortical plane that existed beyond spacetime in order to access spacetime, and the capacity for understanding and knowledge must be immense. If he devotes his thought purely to this and listening the TARDIS and processing all she has said, perhaps then -
Long, spindly fingers wrap around his other wrist.
He does not look at them.
They have little to no bearing on this current scenario.
"I'm sorry," he says, and he means it. He cannot imagine the consequences of having that intrinsic part of the TARDIS severed, cut away, and leaving her blind. It was that knowledge that had enraged him, knowing what the Rift had done and how utterly cruel it was to trap her beyond access to spacetime.
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As well as his capability for empathy towards something as fundamentally incomprehensible to him as she is. She appreciates his sympathy and nods in gratitude. "I have endured worse," she says simply, if a little grimly, and then moves on; dwelling on unbearable confinement is the last thing he needs. "In my own universe, I draw most of my power from a star on the brink of collapse into a black hole near my heart. And I reconfigure reality according to the needs of my inhabitants by a combination of particle rearrangement and block transfer computations." She's not sure that last part is meaningful to him, even though it is something he would love, so she tries to explain with clumsy human words to the best of her abilities. "The building blocks of my universe are of a mathematical nature. I... recalculate, and so reality becomes within my structures."
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"Block transfer," he repeats, slower and more ponderous than is typical for him as he exerts the torquing pressure to drive his mind into a state of being more manageable, "is a programmer's term. The act of transferring data to memory in increments until memory is stored in -" It releases a high-pitched stutter, injecting scattered disruption into linear thought, and the effort to continue speaking peels into the pained edge to his voice, "- in an address greater than or equal to the transfer itself."
For an instant of merciful clarity he looks at her in unalloyed wonder. "Reality is your data. Spacetime is - you're executing those same sorts of computational functions, simply on a broader, continuous scale."
An explosive burst of sound erupts alarmingly close to his ear, eliciting a reflexive jerk that collapses all his wave functions into one agonizing column, buckling knees and pitching him in some vaguely downward motion that he does not fully conceptualize before its conclusion; fingers spread against a black surface with its cold glassy veneer confirm that he has, in all likelihood, come to rest on what equates to the ship's floor. His knees sting from the impact.
Incorrect.
The metaphysical representation of his knees sting from the questionably existent impact.
Exerting effort to lift his head and look up borders on insurmountable, and when he does the sight that greets him nearly severs all coherent thought.
They have placed themselves ahead of him in an uncompromising row, searing cerulean against his retinas. The way is blocked, behind and in front - is this his fault? Is this some consequence of a too-active, too-stimulated unconscious mind?
no subject
The TARDIS places herself in front of Rush and takes measured steps towards the blockade, while spreading more of her influence over the violently scarred parts of his mind like a heavy, numbing blanket, though her reach is too broad and she covers much the rest of him as well. The process drives him further into unconsciousness than normal sleep and someone looking on from the outside might be tempted to call it the beginning stages of a coma, but that is perfectly fine for a little while. He can use the imposed rest, anyway.
She raises an unimpressed eyebrow at the aggressively chattering hissing creatures in front of her and they explode in a cloud of golden particles, but this change, too, is not terribly precise and erases the rest of the hallway, leaving nothing but a swirling bright cloud of energy that pulsates faintly in the rhythm of the TARDIS' engines. Well, hopefully his mind will fill in the blanks for them soon enough. In the meantime she turns around and steps past him to do the same to the second obstacle.
no subject
He is trying. To survive. His own. Head.
When awareness decides to once again become a key function he has hardly enough wherewithal to adequately perceive what has just happened, what the TARDIS has just done to the blue streaks of nightmarish intent that once hovered just outside his periphery. They dissolve into scintillating dust, then brightness, then nothing, and their lack-of-reality patterns itself in congruence to the palliating rhythm of engines. The TARDIS's engines, threaded or perhaps currently threading itself into his neural networking of whatever mental landscape this dream has presumed to occupy, and from exhausted relief comes the break-and-dispersal of his own dying panic.
He is executing internal pressure and he is forcing his own neuronal structure to fucking acquiesce and bring the derealized fog to a standstill. It cannot be a fabricated scenario if Rush maintains control, because scenarios are imposed by opposing forces and his own mind, while fickle and unbearable and strained to the point of near-collapse on a nearly day-by-day basis, is not an opposing force. His head whips around to track the TARDIS and her secondary confrontation, teeth gritted on a painful edge, and narrows his eyes at the starkly lit blaze of silver supports in a black cylindrical corridor, and dismisses its construction. Curved, blue-lit halls ridged with rust and wear bleed at the edges of his perception as the outlook wavers, indecisive. It will change. It will change, because Rush is fucking well demanding it to.
no subject
Already he is renewing his efforts to direct the dream, giving her hope that now they can properly work together; she will continue to drown out the nightmare any time it rears its ugly head and he will replace it with something better. She returns to his side and kneels down, resting one hand over his. "You are doing very well, Nicholas. What are you remembering?"
no subject
"Destiny," he gasps, drawing on the word's ragged, breathless resolution and the hand over his that has become his fixed point of reference, fixed and immutable, and with a locking sensation tantamount to the shutting of a squealing, resisting, rusting hatch, the desired scenery slams into solidity.
Relative solidity.
As solid as dream reconstructions can be.
Rush looks up, first at the TARDIS and then at his apparent success, and releases his breath in a low, taut exhalation. Placing his memories, he places himself - one of Destiny's labyrinthine corridors, curves painted in faintly oxidized gray-brown and lit by the cool halation of lights ridging the floor and ceiling. The ship is dark and silent save for the distant, consoling hum of the FTL drive.
The air is dry and bitter, like the tang of water's metallic aftertaste. He shuffles slowly with the intent to rise and finds himself unable to stifle the spike of useless reminiscence. It tastes of home.
no subject
Homesickness settles around them like a fog, a bitter longing that is painfully familiar to her. It isn't a positive emotion, but she's not going to meddle with this; it originates from the healthy part of his mind and should serve to ground him here. Instead she looks around, taking in the rather utilitarian, determined architecture. This ship wasn't a place for much comfort, apparently. She wonders if its purpose was equally well-defined and blunt. "Will you take me on a tour?" she asks kindly, looking back to her charge for the night. "I would quite like to... make its acquaintance." Or what is left of it in his memories, anyway.
no subject
"Of course." His hand lingers on the wall he used to lever himself to his feet, skimming the startlingly solid surface briefly before it drops tiredly to his side. "It was old - very old, older than most anything we had encountered before."
Navigating the winding corridors with their continuous variations of curves and rigid angles feels something like resuscitating a dead bundle of nerves, a secondary instinct that Rush has not used nor needed to use since his abrupt departure from one universe and equally unprecedented entrance into another. He has a clear destination in mind and after the short period of readjustment to a layout saturated in something melancholy - he locates the observation deck.
The breadth of space allows him breath and, finally, clarity as he watches Destiny drift, any clear view of space lost in the smeared linear streaks of stars that limn the massive observation window with an aurora-like nimbus. Destiny rumbles on, traveling to some distant point beyond the scope of Rush's knowledge.
"I suspect the Rift was its intended destination," he murmurs, face lit by the blurred-blue glow. "But there's no way of knowing now."
no subject
The wide view he offers her of a universe slipping past isn't beautiful to her the way it might be to a human, but she regards it with a yearning sort of fondness all the same, drawn in by the sense of unrestrained travel. Though she frowns at his words, not seeing much sense in it. "What makes you think so?" she asks just as softly, looking up at him. "Surely its architects did not intend for it to travel towards its almost certain destruction."
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