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

[applesaucemod]

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.]

Comments

tw: injury

[wentdowntogeorgia]

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.

[peacefulexplorer]

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.

[wentdowntogeorgia]

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?"

[peacefulexplorer]

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.

[wentdowntogeorgia]

Or, he could panic. That's a thing, too.

"Right now, there's not as much of a difference as you might think."

Lucifer dabs at his broken nose, grimacing at the blood and sting. What did humans even do about broken noses? Do you fix them, or do they just sort of heal on their own? He doesn't really know what you're supposed to do with injuries when you can't just will them to not be there, and he hadn't ever thought that he'd be in the position to find out.

"I am," he says, "an angel of The Lord. Fear not, glad tidings, et-cetera, et-cetera."

He idly waves one hand in a dismissive sort of gesture.

"I realize I probably don't look it at the moment."

[peacefulexplorer]

So. Goa'uld? No, they generally bypass low-grade divinity and move straight ahead to declarations of godhood. So what is this?

"Angel," Daniel repeats, giving up on grappling uselessly with the recalcitrant door handle to brace himself against the seat, pressed as far away from his disconcertingly calm passenger as possible. His heart is still running its own private marathon, but he snatches a breath and forces himself to - compartmentalize. Relatively. "Yeah, okay, sure. Where's your homeworld and how'd you end up on Earth? How long have you been here?"

[wentdowntogeorgia]

Lucifer looks at Daniel curiously, which was probably slightly disconcerting what with the blood still dripping down from his nose. Hope you didn't want that shirt back, Daniel.

"Heaven, and since the beginning of the universe."

Surprise! It's not something that's just pretending to be powerful and supernatural, it actually is. You've won the grand prize.

"Technically longer than that, but it's impossible to assign a length of time to a period before time began."

[peacefulexplorer]

He shakes his head, a slightly shaking hand come up to drive a palm into the center of his forehead.

"No, nononononno, you're talking like, like you're - you're talking like you're one of them."

Because the closest thing to angel is -

They've been here a long time. Longer than anyone.

A chill settles in him. What was this, a test? What do the Others want from him? He thought they were done with him, done dumping memories in his head and tormenting him for the apparent ruckus he raised on high. They've already cast him out from their glowing higher-plane heaven simply for interfering - are they that hypocritical to interfere on his behalf now?

"You are, aren't you?" Daniel's voice cracks, agonized and dark and terrified. "You're one of them. The Ancients."

[wentdowntogeorgia]

"You quoted Scripture at me, I know I don't need to define what an angel is to you."

Seriously, Daniel, Lucifer does not have the patience for this shit right now. He's tired, has practically no Grace, and a nose that isn't going to heal straight, he does not want to deal with a pseudoreligious crisis.

"I am ancient, lowercase 'a'. What or whoever the uppercase-A Ancients are that you're talking about, I don't know or particularly care. My Father is the Lord Almighty, my brothers are archangels, you were right when you guessed the first time and I really just didn't want to deal with your reaction to finding out about it."

[peacefulexplorer]

"Scripture doesn't equate to basis of fact!"

Except when it apparently does.

Daniel has dealt with gods that are gods by declaration and he has dealt with nigh-godlike beings and little gray aliens and everything under the intergalactic sun; he does not have the space to integrate Judeo-Christian angel hierarchy into his worldview right now.

"I didn't honestly think." And he didn't, he really didn't, but now Daniel has an archangel in his car and the archangel has a broken nose and he sounds incredibly not-happy with everything happening right now.

[wentdowntogeorgia]

And Daniel is still panicking. That's still a thing that's happening.

"Yes, I can see that," Lucifer says, because what's really needed right now is the Devil sassing.

"Would it be at all possible," he says, "for you to have your existential crisis later? Perhaps when we're not sitting in a broken car in the middle of the road?"

Does he really have to be the practical one right now? He hates being the voice of reason.

[peacefulexplorer]

"We're - we're -"

Daniel laughs, a high-pitched, out-of-control sound, and one hand flies out to gesture through the cracked windshield at the empty road.

"What do you want me to do? You think this thing'll run? You think I can just drive us out? My door isn't even working. And you're, you know, an archangel so why don't you just zap us -"

And then he stops. Now he's getting it.

"There's something wrong with you," he says slowly which, granted, is not the most polite way to put it but his brain has just been dealt a blunt force trauma, abruptly healed, and then promptly triggered into overdrive. "That's why you were walking and not, I dunno, flying, or whatever it is you do. You're not - you're not all-powerful. Are you?"

[wentdowntogeorgia]

Lucifer doesn't want to be reminded of flying, or of the fact that he can't do it anymore. He'll never be able to fly again, probably, not unless their Father decides to come back and fix them all. His wings are burned down to the bone, useless to him now.

"I was, once."

Once upon a time, there was the most beautiful and brightest angel in Heaven--

[peacefulexplorer]

"But you're not now."

There's no one coming. The road has been, as far as Daniel can tell, completely empty. He narrows his eyes at the allegedly divine being with a broken nose and no wings, and tilts his head.

"Nick. Nicholas. There aren't any archangels with that name, not to my knowledge, and I've got a pretty solid grasp of Scripture." He can't believe he's talking about this. He can't believe he's saying this. "You've already helpfully ruled the others out - Gabriel, Michael, so on and so forth. So which one of them are you?"

[wentdowntogeorgia]

The divine being who healed him, let's not forget. Healed him with the last little bits of power left in his Grace, leaving him unable to fix that broken nose that he's so helpfully fixated on.

"No, there isn't. Nick was the name of my vessel."

It's really a good thing that Nick isn't around anymore. Being the vessel to an archangel would never be a good time, but it would be distinctly less so when the archangel is low on power and has this unfortunate tendency to get knocked around.

"It's forbidden to speak my name in Heaven anymore." Or would be, if there was a Heaven to speak it in. "I tend to go by one of the epithets your kind was fond of. I trust you know the Latin translation of the Hebrew word helel?"

Helel, meaning Shining One, or Light-bringer.

[peacefulexplorer]

"הֵילֵל," Daniel says, quietly horrified. "The Morning Star. Light-bringing."

Pause. He closes his eyes, and swallows.

"Lucifer."

Well.

Shit.

He's been taking a glorified roadtrip with the Devil.

[wentdowntogeorgia]

There is something quietly satisfying in the look of awe-struck horror on Daniel's face. He is the Morningstar, he is the Light-Bringer, he is the Beast Who Is Called Dragon. He may be ruined and in exile, but he is still great and fearsome and deserving of that fear.

"That's the one."

There are a good many epithets for him that humanity has come up with-- Lucifer, the Devil, Satan, Old Scratch. He prefers the ones that remind the speaker of his radiance.

"Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste."

[peacefulexplorer]

"Shut up," snaps Daniel, spell successfully broken by Nick, by Lucifer's flippancy. "There isn't - there isn't going to be a we in this, all right? We're parting ways. This is it. I mean I, I, I crashed my car and the Devil is my passenger and - and - god."

God. He buries his face in one hand.

"I bought you coffee."

[wentdowntogeorgia]

"Yes, you did," he says. "And I healed you. With much of what is left of my Grace, I might add."

He'd liked the coffee. He'd even disliked Daniel less than most of the human race, because Daniel has helped him without expecting anything in return and is not so benightedly stupid as most people are and is quietly, desperately trying to be better than what he is. Perhaps this is what Gabriel meant when he said at least they try, but Lucifer finds it so difficult to view humans as anything more than any other animal on the planet.

Daniel reminds him of Sam. And maybe that's enough.

"If you fear some kind of retribution for helping the Devil, there isn't any coming. My Father doesn't care and... well." He dabs at his nose again, and he thinks it might be bleeding less. "There's nowhere else for it to come from."

[peacefulexplorer]

"You -"

He stops, mystified, scrambling to make sense of a situation beyond what he could have formerly imagined.

Lucifer. The Devil. Lucifer the Devil, the Morningstar, the Beast, the one who was cast out, now reduced to hitchhiking and walking for heretofore unknown reasons, healed him, seemingly without provocation.

"Why?" he asks, wavering between ironclad fear and genuine perplexity. "Why did you heal me?" A heartbeat, then, disgusted, "is it because I'm still useful to you?"

[wentdowntogeorgia]

"Haven't you read the stories, Daniel?"

He presses his fingers together and pulls them apart, a little morbidly fascinated by the tackiness of his own blood. His blood, not just Nick's blood or someone else's blood that happened to get on him.

"A lone and weary traveler on the road, aided by a good Samaritan expecting no thanks or reward in return. And at their parting, the traveler reveals himself as god or angel, and grants blessings to the righteous man for the simple goodness of his deeds."

He raises a hand towards Daniel, like he is the Pope about to give benediction to the amassed worshippers at St. Peter's.

"Blessings be upon you, Daniel Jackson, now and forever."

[peacefulexplorer]

Daniel flinches away from the hand, revulsion quietly simmering in his chest. He doesn't want Lucifer's blessing, not now and certainly not forever. He doesn't want to have been the man who helped the Devil, except now he is.

One more thing he can add to his gallery of failures.

"You stay back," he says, icy. "You stay back."

His fingers still scrabble against the useless handle. Why the fuck did the car door have to break. He needs to get away from this man but the only avenue of escape is cut off to him.

Or - not the only one.

"I don't want your thanks. I don't want any of it. You can just -" One hand jerks, spasmodic, a wordless expression of his twisted guilt and self-loathing. He yanks off his jacket, balls it around one fist. The words curl into something grim, terrified, venomously ironic as he starts punching out the helpfully weakened car window. "Go to hell."

[wentdowntogeorgia]

"I've already been," he says, watching Daniel punch his way out of the vehicle, presumably to get away from him. "It didn't agree with me. I understand that's something of the point."

Hell didn't agree with anyone, never mind the Devil.

Lucifer reaches over to his own door and pushes it open; the impact wasn't on his side, so the frame wasn't bent so badly on it and the door is still functional. He stands, ignoring the throb of pain in his chest at the movement, from bruised ribs, maybe. He did hit the dashboard rather hard.

He walks around to Daniel's side, where he's trying to make his escape.

"I can't heal you again if you hurt yourself. Not for a while, anyway." See why he didn't want to tell Daniel his name? People always reacted this way. "Wouldn't it be easier just to get out on the other side?"

[peacefulexplorer]

Well, all right then, now that Lucifer is over here Daniel is going to do just that and clamor out on the other side. He braces both hands against the vehicle, intent on keeping it between them.

"So have I," he answers viciously, some statement of defiance he doesn't understand. Lucifer's general affability just serves to settle a deeper chill in his spinal cord. "Hell? Been there. Didn't stick either. So if, if you're thinking you can just gut me and leave me, I'm, I don't, I don't stay dead, ever."

He doesn't know what kind of statement he's trying to make, what kind of fury or frustration he's venting. Grasping for consolation, maybe. It's all right if the Devil wants to flay him or reap him or whatever it is the Devil means to do - he walks away from it every time, doesn't he? Why would this be any different?

Maybe because this is the actual Devil. That might be harder to walk away from.

Daniel gulps.

[wentdowntogeorgia]

And the Devil just looks at him placidly over the roof of the car.

"I think we're having two very different conversations," he says, after a moment or two of staring. "I'm not sure where you got this idea about gutting, but that's really not on my to-do list for today."

And it's not as though Daniel's the first person who's gotten out of Hell. Dean Winchester did it, too, albeit with a certain amount of celestial aid, so it's really not all that surprising that someone else did it as well. And, technically, John Winchester managed to get out of Hell when the Devil's Gate opened, though he was kind of dead at the time. Soul or not, it probably still counted.

"Hell and I aren't on speaking terms at the moment," he continues. "You'll note the distinct lack of demons hanging around. So if it's all the same to you, I don't think I'll be sending anyone down to Hell. It's a little high-profile and I'd like to get to New York some time this week, preferably without having anything nasty chasing after me."