applesaucedream | Can't Stand the Distance, Can't Dream Alone [open to all]

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Can't Stand the Distance, Can't Dream Alone [open to all]

The sleeping rifties might have a difficult time realizing they're dreaming this evening, in part because tonight's dreams are atypically vivid, even compared to the rift's usual efforts. Perhaps that is because it's drawing so heavily from the memories of the dreamers, themselves, and using that information to recreate their home worlds in stunning detail. And that is the real reason the dreamers might not be eager to accept the unreality of the situation: the situation is one that many of them have been hoping for for months or even years. In their dreams tonight, the rifties are going home.

Perhaps they arrive in the same moment that they left. Perhaps months have passed at home, or they might even find themselves arriving before their departure point. But those are small details when compared to the overwhelming realization that they're back where they belong.

They're not alone. Many dreamers will find the rift has given them a companion for the return trip. Well, an uncomplicated return home is probably more than anyone could have hoped for, anyway. And for the unwitting visitor, perhaps another universal displacement will be easier to bear with the addition of a local guide.

[ooc: usual dream party rules apply; all are welcome, and dreamers can remember or forget the events of the dream at the players' discretion. Also at the players' discretion: when their character arrives in their 'home universe,' and how many (if any) locals they'd want to run into.]

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He looks over at Daniel, then down again at his own vessel. He had been able to keep Nick clean before by virtue of his Grace; he doesn't really know what actually goes in to the process of human hygiene. He knows, theoretically, how it works, that the addition of water and soap and person somehow comes out as cleanliness on the other side of the equal sign, but isn't quite sure of the specifics of how one gets there. Presumably there is scrubbing involved.

Humans did it literally every day, though. How hard could it possibly be?

"Yes," he says. "I'll do that."

He stands, ignores the utter hatred that his feet are sending him from being forced to bear his weight again, and goes into the bathroom. He closes the door, because he thinks there's something with modern humans about nudity and not being naked in front of strangers, so removing his clothes in Daniel's view may not be socially acceptable. It's probably better to be safe than accidentally make an unfortunate social insinuation.

Lucifer removes his clothing once he is out of eyeshot, folding each article before setting it on the counter. He looks at himself in the mirror for the first time and, at that point, perhaps understands why Daniel stopped in the first place. He is dirty, his face dust-smeared and his hair looking brown rather than blond, streaky where sweat has taken some of the grime off. His beard is hitting a fairly advanced stage of unruliness, long past the point where he should have started shaving it. There is a distinct difference in the skin tone of his face and hands and arms as compared to his torso, both from tanning and from simply the fact that his covered skin has less dirt on it. Nick had not been the thinnest man when he'd possessed him-- he is middle-aged and, though perhaps fairly decent-looking for forty, had carried a little weight around the middle-- and now had lost most of whatever spare fat he'd been carrying. Walking a few hundred miles is apparently an effective dieting plan.

There are small containers of soaps next to the sink, which he assumes are to be used for bathing. The bar is a shape he is familiar with, while the 'conditioner' and 'shampoo' are strange substances that he does not feel that he requires. Soap in hand, he turns to the shower itself.

There is a shower head at the top, which he understands is where water comes from. There is a dial and handle further down, which works in some manner that he is not particularly familiar with.

This could be more difficult than he expected.

Edited 2014-12-08 02:58 (UTC)

For a time Daniel's content to scrawl in his notebook in silence, but eventually it strikes him how that might be a little more silence than is typical for a shower. He glances at the bathroom door, concerned, but feels that calling to ask if everything's okay would be inappropriate somehow. Then again, there're definitely a few things off about Nick that leads Daniel to believe that he really has unintentionally picked up an offworlder.

Finally his willpower can't hold any longer. The apparent silence from the bathroom means that whatever Nick's doing in there, Daniel probably isn't interrupting anything important.

He knocks tentatively.

"Uh. You all right in there?" Okay, wait. He can't just call things like that into a bathroom. "Is the shower broken or something? Wouldn't be surprised, with the state of this place." Marginally better.

No, Daniel. Things are not all right in there. Lucifer is the Angel of the Deepest Pit, He Who Is Called Dragon, the Morningstar, Father of Lies, and he cannot figure out how to work a fucking shower. He's having a minor existential crisis over tugging on a weird device and having nothing happen and this is something that even children can use, how is this giving him a problem?

He is seriously considering using whatever is left of his Grace to burn this entire establishment to the ground in a desperate attempt to save his dignity. It would probably be doing the world a favor.

But if he does that, he might burn Daniel, as well, and that would be an unacceptable way to reward him.

He glances over his shoulder at the door, not that Daniel can see it.

"I'm... fine," he replies, probably less certainly than someone who's actually fine would.

That is the exact intonation of 'fine' that someone uses when things are not actually fine but they don't want to admit it.

All right.

Fine.

"Seriously," says Daniel, now pinching the bridge of his nose. "I can call maintenance. It's not a problem. Is the thing not working?"

That's because Lucifer is not fine and really doesn't want to admit it.

"I..."

He doesn't want more humans brought into this mess. And if there isn't anything actually wrong with it, someone will be there for no reason, and even Satan realizes that coming into a by-the-hour fleabag motel like this where two men are sharing a room, one of which is in Lucifer's state and the other of which is in Daniel's state, will raise eyebrows. Eyebrows will be raised and Lucifer doubts that, after all the ceaseless irritations of the past month, he will be able to restrain himself from setting the eyebrow-raisee on fire.

Daniel would probably not appreciate that, and that would probably draw even more attention to Lucifer. It is a situation that he should avoid, if at all possible.

"I don't know if it's broken."

Edited 2014-12-08 03:38 (UTC)

Oh for god's sake.

"Do you need me to check?" Daniel asks patiently. Bearing in mind that this guy could legitimately be from another planet, the confusion is understandable. And Daniel really, really thinks Nick should at least be able to take a shower. For everyone's sake.

"I would appreciate," he says, "just a little less patronizing, if you don't mind."

He reaches for one of the towels that's hanging from a rack and wraps it around his waist, securing it by tucking in one of the corners. Then, at least, if he opens the door, Daniel won't be scandalized by the sight of another man's genitalia, which apparently is something that people get scandalized over these days. Modern day is a strange, strange time.

"But yes, I do."

He shuts his eyes in an extended blink of self-directed frustration. Patronizing was what he'd been hoping to avoid tone-wise, but he must be more tired than he thought.

"It's no problem," he says, then the door opens and Daniel gets the full power of an unwashed man's aura.

That takes him a minute.

Daniel steels himself with another lengthy blink and a brief shake of his head, then once more unto the breach. He has killed gods and stared down incomprehensible omnipotent lightshow aliens. Surely he can enter this malodorous domain and fix the goddamn shower.

A few twists of the knob rewards him with the gratifying hiss of water, then some fiddling with the admittedly faulty dial adjusts the temperature to what Daniel assumes is the norm shower temperature. Flicking water off his fingertips, he rises and shrugs.

"I guess it's fine? Sometimes places like these are a little, you know." He jerks his head expressively. "You good?" Cause Daniel would really like to get out of the reeking hellhole of a bathroom.

Lucifer turns in an attempt at making room and at keeping his back out of Daniel's view, though the mirror on the wall behind him makes that essentially impossible; he doesn't want the man to take much interest in the two burns he has, running from shoulder blade to mid-back. They are shiny and red and fairly fresh, still mottled around the ugly yellows and greens of a healing bruise, from when his wings burned all the way down to the root.

"I think I can take it from here."

And even if he has trouble, he'll muddle through it. He has seen things washed before, it can't be that difficult in practice-- soap, washing cloth, apply directly to the ~~forehead~~ dirty areas.

This is your cue to exit stage left, not pursued by angel.

Edited 2014-12-08 05:28 (UTC)

The mirror being the treacherous object it is, Nick doesn't quite succeed in concealing said burns from Daniel. His hand freezes on the doorknob but he rapidly decides against bringing it up now. Whatever the story behind those horrific looking injuries, they're not going to want to have it in a seedy bathroom over a running shower while fifty percent of them are barely clothed.

"Right," says Daniel with a brisk nod, and shuts the door behind him.

He finds it considerably more difficult to focus on his half-legible Latin musings. Those injuries looked more than a little horrific, so of course they wouldn't come up in casual conversation. Daniel nibbles at the pen in distracted concern, batting his options around without much success.

Lucifer would really prefer that they come up in exactly zero conversations, whether held mostly naked or not, but he's probably not going to get lucky like that. Daniel seems to be a bit of a busybody, and, considering his stubbornly altruistic tendencies, will probably not be able to leave well enough alone. Not if he thinks that there's something he could do to help, anyway.

He tugs off the towel and tosses it aside before opening the shower curtain; there is steam starting to come out of the shower, heavy and humid. He steps in with wash cloth and soap, and the water that sluices over him is so unexpectedly blissful that he may have made a slightly less than dignified noise at the feeling of it. There was something visceral and immediate about being in his vessel with his Grace low, inches away from being human; less of a buffer between himself and the experiences of his body, perhaps. Whatever it is, Lucifer stands there for several long minutes reveling in it, eyes closed and head stuck underneath the spray. These few moments of animal bliss are the closest to Heaven that he's been in millennia.

Eventually, though, he has to pull his head back out, push his hair out of his face, and actually get to the point of this. The hot water will not last forever, which is a fucking shame, and he doesn't want to still be in there when it cuts out.

He takes the soap and the cloth and lathers it up, and starts working on scrubbing off the layers of road-dust.

The water goes cool before he's done anyway. He can't say he's surprised.

The Latin can wait, Daniel realizes the longer the shower apparently goes on. It's not like Nick's clothes were in much better condition than the man himself. Thankfully he looked around Daniel's height so it's the work of the minute to scour out jeans and a jacket and a t-shirt that look like they'll fit.

After a minute's hesitation, he leaves them in a neat folded stack just outside the bathroom before deciding that now's as good a time as any to fill up the car's tank properly. That was a 24-hour gas station, and he doesn't trust himself to be cognizant enough in the morning to remember to fill the thing then. Besides, Nick'll probably want space. Or something.

At the conclusion of his shower, Lucifer dries quickly and wraps the towel around his waist again; his clothes, he realizes as he looks at them laying sadly on the counter, are not fit for wearing. They really aren't fit for anything but burning, and even that's probably too good a fate for them. He had been filthy for long enough that he'd accepted it as a kind of default state of being, but the difference between being dirty and clean is prominent now that he's at the other end of the spectrum.

He has some reluctance, though, in getting rid of Nick's clothes. They are not his; they were his vessel's. Though now, he supposes, they're as much his as anyone's, since Nick has long since left the building.

He keeps the ring.

Opening the door, he looks for Daniel out in the room; it's empty and there is a set of clothes at his feet, which he presumes are for him. Daniel is barely shorter than his vessel and built similarly, and when he unfolds the clothes, they seem close to what he previously wore, size-wise. They fit well enough, when he puts them on. The old clothes are taken outside and thrown away.

By the time Daniel gets back from filling up the tank, Lucifer is sitting on the bed, legs crossed, the bedside table Bible open in his lap.

Daniel is relieved, upon returning, to find Nick both out of the shower and fully clothed. Much better. And also reading the copy of the Old Testament, but seeing as they're hard-pressed for reading material Daniel doesn't blame him.

"Better?" he asks, closing the door with a snap. He sits back down on his own bed, picks up his notebook, starts tilting it this way and that as he tries to decide what angle he was attempting to work from.

"They say cleanliness is next to Godliness," he replies, not looking up from his reading.

'You surely will not die," said the Shining One to the woman, 'for God knows that in the day you eat from the it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing both Good and Evil.'

"What is it that you're working on? You seem intent."

He arranges himself into his earlier position, back propped against the headboard, this time with one knee drawn up as he turns the notebook over and over and over and over and - there, okay! no wait, that's not right - and over and over.

"Mm? Oh, just - getting words out of my head." Daniel taps his the pen against the side of the notebook, having worked out its proper orientation. "Took a bit of a sabbatical not too long ago." A sabbatical on a higher plane is still a sabbatical. "Sometimes I just need to sit down, try and process everything." And try to map out the secrets of the universe that are allegedly buried somewhere in his subconscious, if only he could dig them out.

Lucifer turns the page and continues to read about how he is portrayed. The Serpent in the Garden, the temptation of Eve, the Fall of Mankind. This isn't how he remembers it, but he doesn't really expect anyone to have gotten it right. Divinely inspired though the good book might be, it still went through countless mortal minds, and they would undoubtedly alter it as their interpretations saw fit.

"Where did you take your sabbatical?"

Whatever he saw there was apparently fascinating and difficult, considering how he'd kept turning the pad of paper around like he couldn't figure out which way is up.

"North." Very far north. "Wasn't really planned, but it was what my work needed at the time."

He watches Nick for a moment, wondering if a presumably highly religious upbringing would have affected his desire to crack open a Bible. The answer seems to be: apparently not.

There's also seriously nothing else for him to do, unless he wants to stare at Daniel while he works for the whole time. That's one of those things that tends to make people uncomfortable.

But going 'up North' sounds like how Lucifer would say that he was imprisoned 'down South', and he finally looks up from his examination of the Scripture. It's missing parts of the story, anyway.

"And what did you find up North?"

Different mythos, but Nick's not wrong.

"Clarity, or so I'm told." He tips his head to one side and tries to work out if the rough Latin approximation of 'firefighters' is actually relevant. "And change."

He smiles, small and humorless and self-deprecating. "You know, all those pretentiously, supposedly deeply meaningful epiphanies that, when examined in the sum of their parts, actually mean very little. It wasn't a fun trip home."

"Spiritual enlightenment isn't all it's cracked up to be, is it."

He says this like he's speaking from personal experience which, in a certain sense, he is. He's seen spiritual enlightenment handed down to prophets and martyrs for ages by the angels, and it's all just agendas and propaganda. Getting done what they want done by the careful manipulation of these humans that they're supposed to be shepherding.

'Deeply meaningful' his feathery ass.

Lucifer has nothing but disdain for humanity, but at least he hasn't spun it to look like it's just a higher form of love.

Daniel blows out a noisy breath.

"Too right," he mutters. "I mean, I still don't know what they were trying to - to - just -" He makes a frustrated, jerking wave of one hand that summarizes very little other than his own complete exasperation with being unable to understand. "When someone has the power, you know, the power to intervene and, and change things for the better but then - doesn't. Doesn't that make them, on some level, responsible? Someone who can change things but elects not to and - it just - it's frustrating, it really is."

He shakes his head, chewing on his lower lip furiously. He didn't fully intend to break off on a self-righteous tirade against the beings that wouldn't care about his opinion of them one way or the other, especially in front of a stranger to whom the whole thing probably seems tangential. So he returns to his jumbled Latin text, quietly trying to burn off some of that vicious, spiking outrage.

Lucifer is watching him while he speaks, this human with righteous anger at beings beyond his comprehension. These are words he recognizes-- what other conclusion could you come to than God wanted the Devil?-- just in slightly different context, and he wonders just what celestial beings Daniel has come in contact with that have been jerking him around so fiercely.

"Is there any greater injustice," he says softly, "than a being with power and foresight who mouths justice but delivers none? Who mouths mercy and delivers none; who mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness given seventy times seven, and delivers none; who decries crime and allows every atrocity?"

A God who mouths justice and mercy and love and invented Hell. A God who made the brightest angel, knowing that he would Fall; made him to punish him, had his punishment ready for him before he had even thought to commit his sins.

"What do you call a being," he says, "who mouths morals and has none?"

"It's hypocrisy," he agrees quietly. He picks up his pad of paper and then sets it down again, unable to contain the wealth of furious frenetic energy in a pen's small movements. "It's - you're right, it is injustice. It is. It's building a world, populating it, giving it life and meaning and sentience and then leaving it behind with access to the tools for its own destruction."

There's the faint impression that this diatribe is modulating into specifics he shouldn't be voicing, but Nick sounds as if he - understands, almost, and with the blazing cruelty of Daniel's existence now, post-Ascension and post-everything, he's just broken the valve of his own bitter, fragmented indecision.

"And when that world makes an appeal to the ones who built it, there's no answer. There's no answer and there's never any help, because that wouldn't be in the spirit of free will." Daniel picks up the pad again absently, stares at the letters there with mounting disgust, then in an abrupt snap of a wrist tears the top page off and crumples it. "It's not free will when our own dissolution is coded into us. It's not free will when they're the ones making the choice at our expense."

"It's a stacked deck," he agrees. Out of all of the people who could have found him in the back woods of Pennsylvania, what are the odds that the one who picked him up would be one who voices the arguments that he used to say?

"When every possible move leads to losing, the choice ceases to matter."

And what can you do when there is no choice?

"And these beings who remove the choice from us try to shuffle blame for our actions onto us, instead of placing it where it rightfully belongs. Then they have the audacity to demand our unquestioning obedience."

Edited 2014-12-09 00:50 (UTC)

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