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

Current Music: Evening August 4/Morning August 5, 2013

Entry tags:

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.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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)

Whatever similarity Nick's experienced, whether it's an injustice dealt out from fate or from the universe or the hand of God, the obedience induces a tiny shiver.

Daniel wets his lips. "I won't say we don't have choice. I won't say we're pawns, shaped by our fate or our trajectory in this universe or however you choose to define it. But those that -" He has to stop himself from saying Ancients. "Those that came before, or might have. Our power is to not allow them to determine us."

He thinks of countless worlds, burned-out husks because the inhabitants exercised their right of free will and set ablaze their cities. He thinks of the metallic electrical snap of radiation that seared up his hand as he reached out to grasp the thing that would dissolve his body into millions of dying cells. He thinks of formless energy transmuted into physical flesh.

He shakes his head.

"We're not a fixed point."

Lucifer thinks of Heaven, thinks of that exact moment when he realized that God made all angels perfect and complete and he had Fallen and that meant that God wanted him to Fall, remembers that moment when he knew that the Father he had loved above all things made him, brightest and most beautiful, just to cast him down. He remembers lying in the ashes of Hell and knowing that this Hell had been made for him, had been prepared for him before he'd ever looked at his Father with anything but love and obedience. All those times he'd looked at their Father's creation and seen this terrible thing he'd made and thought even this evil thing has a place in my Father's plans, not knowing what it was for--

Not knowing until he lay broken and disgraced in its depths that it had always had his name written on it.

Where was his choice?

"So, you fight against the things that would bend you to their own designs. You fight, in every way that you can, because that's the only way you'll ever be free."

He does-- Lucifer fought for so long and for so hard, fought against everything because he has nothing else left to him. God has decreed that he cannot be both free and good so he'll take the freedom.

"The only problem is," says Daniel, shutting his eyes and sweeping off his glasses to dangle them from a weary hand, "not knowing if fighting is the choice you've been intended make. The self-fulfilling prophecy."

God, he's tired.

Not so much in the purely physical sense. He's fairly certain he's been on the verge of sleep-deprived collapse for hours on end.

Rather, he's tired of the broken string of cosmic misfortunes that get funneled into him, how the shock of each unknowable strike is clearly, plainly meant to disassemble him permanently but he always comes back from it, always, whether it is his logic or his destiny or his fate or the bizarre, contradictory fact that the otherwise indifferent Ancients simply will not allow him to die. Daniel still can't tell if it's out of some twisted sense of obligation, a way to justify their inaction, or if they simply want to punish him for daring to point out the injustice of their sanctimonious apathy.

He's tired.

He drops his glasses on the bedside table and rubs both hands over his face.

"What else is there to do?"

When faced with an indifferent universe, what can you do but struggle against it? Even if there is no way to know that what you're doing is the best thing, or even the right thing? The only other option is to lay down and let it steamroll right over you.

Lucifer stands, walking the step or two needed to bring him to Daniel's bedside. For a moment he looks at him, sitting there with his face in his hands, and feels pity for these sorry creatures that his Father made. There is something about Daniel that reminds him of Sam; a well-meaning man, firm in morals and determined to be good, who is dashed up, again and again, against the rocks of misfortune.

"You should rest. Whatever you're writing will still be there tomorrow."

"Mm." He restructures his thoughts with the shake of his head and the unsteady swipe of one hand through his hair. "Probably right. Got driving to do tomorrow."

He looks up at Nick, the random stranger pulled off the side of the road who speaks and moves and acts with a sense of displacement relative to everything around him, and wonders for the millionth time what his story could possibly be. Also for the millionth time, Daniel concludes it's not likely to become clear to him in any immediate fashion.

"You should too, you know," he says, shifting to align himself in a more comfortable horizontal position over the hotel comforter he isn't going to bother with. He only ever sleeps on top of beds, not in them. "Sleep, I mean. You've been walking a while."

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject