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

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

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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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"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."

"Yes, I have."

Daniel has no idea how long and how far he's walked and how far he still has yet to go.

He walks over to the window and closes the drapes, blocking out the light from streetlights and cars. The motel is back far enough from the highway that the noise isn't too obnoxious, but there is still traffic going on outside at all hours from truckers coming through.

Lucifer doesn't trust this place to be remote enough that some demon couldn't find him. He will need, at some point, to ward the room, just in case there's something tracking him. Salt and sigils, which will be hard enough to keep from Daniel so that he doesn't ask too many inconvenient questions.

He returns to his bed, sitting with his back propped against the headboard. He can wait.

Nick might not be tired enough yet, but Daniel most certainly is. The exhaustion of the day is overpowering and pretty soon halfhearted Latin musings aren't compelling enough to keep him awake.

Content to stretch out on top of the hotel bed fully clothed, Daniel's breathing gradually deepens until he drops out.

When Daniel is asleep, Lucifer gets up and takes one of the keys and leaves; he walks the short distance to the convenience store, which is fortunately open twenty-four hours. He makes his purchases with the leftover money that Daniel gave him, a bag of salt and a heavy black marker, a few other odds and ends. He returns within half an hour and puts a salt line in front of the door and window. There's a small section of tile just on the inside of the door that has a mat on it, big enough to cover the salt line, and he adds a devil's trap just in case.

He adds other sigils in hidden areas, behind furniture and across the foot of the bed where the bedspread hangs down, additional layers of protection. He stashes the rest of the salt underneath the bathroom sink and lays out the rest of his purchases on the counter.

Chicken bones, graveyard dirt, spider thread, and equal parts lavender and hemp, wrapped up in cotton cloth. A hex bag, one that will hide its possessor from demons-- and from angels, if that had been an issue. He murmurs a few words in Latin as he ties it, sealing the spell inside.

He puts it in Daniel's luggage, buried down underneath his possessions so he won't notice it very quickly and, protections complete, returns to sit on his bed and pass the night.

Edited (this is what happens when I tag on my ipad) 2014-12-09 18:52 (UTC)

Morning. Morning? Morning.

Ugh.

Daniel thinks he releases a noise that sounds vaguely human and not remotely sentient and tries to get up in a movement that lacks motor coordination so intrinsically that it merely ends up flipping him onto his stomach. One hand fists into the underused pillow and half-drags at it for leverage without success.

"Hrrrgh," says Daniel. He unsticks his eyelids to peer blearily at the clock.

How is it seven A.M.

With another grunt, he rolls onto his side, blinking furiously to clear the sleep from his vision, and immediately sees the person sitting directly across from him. Staring at him.

He makes a strangled noise that definitely does not approach anything within the realm of dignified and nearly falls off the bed.

He watches Daniel wake, slowly and reluctantly; he doesn't see the appeal of sleep, personally. It hasn't been pleasant for him any time it happened, and it honestly doesn't look pleasant for Daniel, either. And he snores, too. It's very undignified.

Daniel barely stays on the bed after he notices Lucifer's presence across from him, and the Devil cocks his head at the awkward position he's twisted himself into. Nothing surprising here, Satan is exactly where you left him. And, if it would make him feel any better, it's perfectly possible that he slept-- perhaps he's just an early riser. A very early riser.

"Good morning," he says, because he's fairly certain that's the common greeting.

"Holy shit," pants Daniel, righting himself into a sitting position. One hand presses against the side of his head that's already begun aching a dull, resolute reminder for caffeination. "Don't do that."

At least his adrenaline just got a reasonable boost, making it much easier for Daniel to stand and make his way to the bathroom where the direct application of cold water to face sharpens him up the remainder of the way.

"All right, all right. I get it," he says wearily as he exits. One hand makes a halfhearted attempt to flatten his hair while he crosses the room to the bedside and retrieves his glasses. "We caffeinate and then we're outta here, no lingering." Like they'd want to with this place.

Watching Daniel sleep had been about as boring as it sounds; he's much more interesting when he's awake, not that it's a high bar to pass. And Lucifer was getting tired of being in this fleabag motel, anyway. Every minute that he's sitting there is a minute that he's not getting closer to finding Gabriel, to finding out who is responsible for the angels' Fall.

"Very well," he says, watching Daniel go about his morning routine.

He has nothing to gather and no morning routine that he goes by; he just stands and goes to put his feet back in his worn shoes.

Seeing as Daniel bothered to bring in very little from his car, it's simply a matter of ensuring he's got keys and wallet and the pad of paper from the night before before making a vaguely unsteady pathway out the door.

"Right." The room door closes behind them and Daniel jabs one thumb over his shoulder to indicate the car. "I'm gonna check us out, grab coffee, and then we can -" The last word breaks into a low-pitched yawn, and he doesn't complete the sentence but simply ambles off, presumably to check out.

While Daniel goes to take care of the night's bill, Lucifer goes to acquire the coffee that only one of them really requires; getting on the road quickly is to both of their benefits. The coffee, though at least fresh at this time of day, isn't any better quality than can be expected from a convenience store, and when he returns to wait by the car for Daniel, he has two large cups of it in hand.

He thinks, if he were to lay waste to the Earth as he had once planned, that he would spare the ones who knew how to make coffee. There had to be people to grow it and process it and do whatever it is that they do to make it properly; they could stay. The devil's own personal barista.

It's all a moot point, anyway, because there can be no Apocalypse without a Heaven to oppose.

Daniel's pleasantly surprised to find that Nick's already waiting with coffee when he returns. One thumb worrying at an eye socket, he unlocks the car and climbs in. The tank is already full thanks to his compulsive tact the night before and he'll be starting the day off caffeinated, even if he's waking up at seven A.M. to do it. Not a bad start.

He takes an appreciative sip, as usual with absolutely no care for the heat, then nods to himself.

"All right, then. To New York we go."

Lucifer takes his place in the passenger seat, both hands wrapped around the warmth of the coffee cup, drinking it slower than Daniel. He doesn't drink it like it'll run away from him if he doesn't get it fast enough; he lets the taste linger. It's heavy and bitter and a little burned, a sort of woodsmoke aftertaste.

The hours of rest have done his vessel some good. It hurts less, though the pain of his vessel is something that he knows how to ignore, and he has been able to use the Grace he would normally be burning off to repair some of his damage. By the time they make it to New York, he might even be presentable, if a little too bearded.

"What's in New York for you?"

Nick might be savoring his coffee but Daniel bolts his with an almost absentminded energy, like it's never occurred to him not to down his coffee as quick as he can go. He'll deal with the diuretic aftereffects later - for now he'll watch road and wheel with his intriguing passenger.

"Mm, leftover problems from my inability to deal as a kid," he says lightly, honestly, turning out of the lot and back onto the broad expanse of road. The explanation comes easily before he has time to think much about it, as explanations spawned from dreams will do. "Got some time off work, figured I should focus on those."

"That's ambiguous," he says, carefully prying the lid off of the top of his cup so that he can actually smell something other than plastic when he takes a drink.

"I hope it's not daddy issues-- I think there's only room for one set of those in this car."

And, really, there's no possible way that anything in Daniel's past could possibly trump the sheer magnitude of the issues that Lucifer has with his Father. He is the Ur-example of daddy issues, the metaphorical gold standard by which all other daddy issues are measured.

He can't help but lift a truly impressive seriously?-styled eyebrow at that. Ambiguous - as if his friend Nick here has been anything but.

"Nope," he answers, the fluidity of his tone becoming more than a little forced. "I'd have to have a dad for those. Or, you know, parents."

It's not like he makes a great secret of it, but talking about it is still a bit jarring.

"I'm sorry for your loss."

That's what people say when someone loses family. As far as comfort goes, it's lip-service, as useless as any words are, but--

But if there is anything that Lucifer understands, it's loss. It's not the same as his dead family, it's not even the same as when he thought Gabriel was dead, or the losses during the civil war, but it is still loss.

Maybe he's been staying a little too close to human. Once he finds Gabriel and can allow his Grace to return to a more acceptable level, then perhaps things will be better.

Daniel shrugs.

"I was a kid. I don't really remember."

An easy lie.

Eight years old is enough to remember watching one's parents get crushed to death.

The hotel disappears behind them far too quickly, or maybe time passes in a too-rapid slideaway, or maybe Daniel hasn't been paying attention, but the darkened morning sky is bombarding them with an irradiating, flaring blaze of sunrise, ahead of schedule. Or on schedule. Daniel's coffee is gone, so time must have passed even if he can't fully account for it. He shakes his head in an effort to adjust himself to his surroundings, a motion that's quickly, worryingly becoming familiar.

"Children know more than they're given credit for."

There is a little silence between them for a while, during which-- something happens. Lucifer isn't sure what, but it feels like he's lost time, like it's just gone from pre-dawn to morning without the trouble of going through the time in between. It's something he would have been able to do if he had more Grace, just slip sideways through the lateral flow of the timeline, but he didn't do that. He didn't do anything.

His coffee cup is sitting in the cupholder, empty. He doesn't remember drinking all of it, and he doesn't forget things. He doesn't forget anything.

Lucifer glances over at Daniel, to see if he's noticed the disturbance, or if it was only visible to someone who isn't actually human.

Nick seems similarly thrown. Daniel can at least take comfort in the fact that it's not just him.

"I felt it too," he mutters, grip tense against the reassuring solidity of the wheel. He squeezes his eyes shut in an effort to reorder everything in his head, make sense of a timeline that's suddenly become corrupt. When he opens them again, the disorder has progressed into the spatial as well as temporal - the road flickers in his vision like something out of a mirage, as if it can't decide whether it wants to exist or not. The pressure of reality compounding against itself, barriers folding.

The sunlight is far too close, scintillating in its proximity. And then it - shifts, displacing into a hardened column, stark against quivering roadway, emblazoning white-hot imprints of its formless silhouette against closed eyelids.

Daniel swerves to avoid the thing that he's not sure is really there.

Between heartbeats the road breaks and reforms, scatters beneath tires and organizes back into its recognizable shape.

"What the hell is -" he begins, before the car swings in an unstable arc to slam into something vertical and uncompromising and sickeningly physical.

Oh, good, now the spatial distortions were starting up. That's exactly what Lucifer wants to be dealing with right now, when he doesn't have the mojo to force it to stop. It's really, incredibly dysphoric to be watching it in more than just four dimensions and have all of those dimensions be fucked up.

"Daniel--" Lucifer says as he turns the wheel and the visual disturbances are resolving and they are still on the exact trajectory to hit something. He calculates weight and velocity and the resistant force of gravity and he comes up short as far as power to move the automobile out of the way goes, which is really unfortunate right about now. He almost regrets those times he used his Grace for fixing trivial little things, except that bathroom really had been disgusting.

There is an instant before the impact where Lucifer realizes that he is actually going to be in a car accident right now. This is actually going to happen and he thinks he should probably have put his seat belt on.

Then there is the impact itself, and Lucifer is slammed forward into the dashboard.

All sound shuts out for an indeterminate amount of time, leaving a dull ringing that vibrates in his jaw and makes his teeth hurt.

Well. Inaccurate.

Everything hurts.

Daniel has no grasp of basic orientation and no sense of categorizing; he simply has the parts that hurt and then the immediate space surrounding said parts. Shaking his head to clear it initially seems an acceptable choice of action but this turns out to prove difficult, seeing as the slightest twitch of movement in that general area sends a wave of extremely disagreeable pain juddering down to his spine.

So, ow.

Everything smears into a relative sort of focus, and Daniel understands that his vision is blurry in part because of how his glasses are askew and also broken, a latticework of cracks punched into one lens. The other lens appears to be missing or, or no, not missing, just blown out into fragments that seem to be embedded in the flesh surrounding the corresponding eye. Which. Cause and effect - this is likely because the car, the car, the car has crashed and for some reason it lacks airbags or they have refused to work for whatever inane reason, and thus Daniel's head has smacked into the window.

He works one hand up to the apparent injury pulsing on the left side of his head. He hisses when fingers brush it, and the tips come away wet and warm and red. Oh, so not good.

The pain appropriately shatters the dulled patina of shock and Daniel's sensory capabilities return in a rush, as well as his awareness that he wasn't alone in the car when this happened which, shit.

"Nick," he says, or tries to say, but the sound bubbles out half-formed.

Lucifer's vessel is made of sterner stuff than the average human, so the bone-jarring impact with the dashboard cracks the plastic rather than his skull. It's still painful, though, and the sharp jolts of pain that stutter through his head and neck and down his chest are unpleasant. He pushes himself off of the dash and back into his seat, touches his face where it's warm and wet to find blood there.

Broken nose, possibly. He may have hit face-first.

He looks over at Daniel, who is definitely far worse off, because he is only human.

"Daniel," he says, leaning over and putting a hand on his shoulder to tilt him at a better angle to see him from. He is badly injured; the glass from his shattered lens has barely avoided damaging his eye and there are fractures in his jaw and spine. Movement could easily cause more trauma. This human form is so fragile, so easily destroyed by something as simple as an impact. If Lucifer left him here, he might very well perish.

Well, this should pretty much cover the debt.

"Stay still," Lucifer tells him and presses two fingers to Daniel's forehead. He pulls on his Grace and there is, briefly, a light in his hand and what human ears would perceive as a high-frequency droning sound, and Daniel is healed in the space between heartbeats.

The words take too long to creep into understanding. Before Daniel can fully process them or anything else, a shrieking, piercing pitch cracks into the sluggishness of thought, drills into Daniel's awareness in supraorbital, visceral, unbearable effect.

There is the brush of fingers and the sear of light, and the displaced nerves and fractures in jaw and bone knit themselves together in a crack of internal architecture realigning.

The shock of once again having a working, pain-free body reduces Daniel to blinking, breathless disbelief - before he turns to his passenger who is, apparently, only superficially damaged and, equally apparently, has just stitched his body back together in the span of a few seconds.

"What did - how did you -" he manages, and that's about it.

Edited 2014-12-11 19:38 (UTC)

While Daniel looks about right as rain at the moment, unbruised and unbroken after his healing, Lucifer has to brace himself with one arm against the cracked dash to keep upright. He is painfully low on Grace, and he didn't exactly start out with much-- his vision swims sickeningly and a cold, clammy feeling breaks out across his neck and back and chest. Terribly human reactions to draining himself, because after this he's going to be basically human in all but name. His Grace is officially tapped out

He really would've liked to have been able to heal his nose up first.

Lucifer looks over at Daniel's protests, entirely unamused.

"Are you really going to give this gift horse a dental exam right now?"

Yes, that's exactly what Daniel's doing between scrambling back and trying to get the broken - broken, why does it have to be broken? - door handle to just open, damnit, because his impression of Nick's less-than-human status has turned out to be sort of right.

"Not human," he stammers, frantic. Right now panic is doing a good job trumping reason. "You're not human. What are you? Goa'uld? Offworlder? How did you do that?"

True, he just went and completely healed Daniel from whatever injuries he sustained, but - but this could potentially be an Earth security matter.

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tw: car accidents of a possibly metaphysical nature

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tw: injury

tw: injury

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