applesaucedream | Sweeter than the First Time [Open to All]

Current Music: Evening of August 14th/Morning of August 15th, 2013

Sweeter than the First Time [Open to All]

photo dream party visual_zpsua3sjlqf.jpg

Hello, dreamers of Manhattan. The Rift knows that things have been kind of rough, lately. The last dream didn't go as well as it had hoped. Consider this an apology of sorts, and a hearkening back to the good times you've shared.

It's a grand old (and potentially familiar) cabin house that the dreamers will find themselves wandering. The furniture is plentiful and comfortable, the floors are strewn with cushions and blankets, and there are cheerful fires burning in the grates. It seems a little odd that the house still manages to be on the chilly side despite looking so warm, yet it is.

Oh, well. You'll just have to find another dreamer or two and ~~spoon up and fall asleep like little baby cats~~ get cozy. It shouldn't be difficult; most of the dreamers (excepting those with strong telepathic defenses or deeply ingrained cuddle-averse personalities) will find themselves feeling friendlier than usual, along with an almost overwhelming desire to snuggle up to someone. How convenient that the house seems designed for that very purpose!

~~And if some of the cushions are Hello Kitty themed, well, that's just coincidence.~~

[OOC: Standard dream party rules apply. Characters will be affected by the dream-whammy to whatever degree makes the most sense for them, and will remember or forget the events of the dream at the player's discretion. Backtag into infinity.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It's almost comfortable enough to start dozing, but Tim's been doing a decent job of holding it off. The abrupt presence of someone else startles him enough out of the pleasant haze he's been settling into. Wait, hang on - okay, so it's Johnny, right?

"Uh," he says, momentarily wrong-footed as he gives the fireplace a dubious look. This is a dream? It just feels really...really real. He shifts a little in his seat. He's not sure he likes that. "It's all right. I guess." His eyebrows raise a little and his shoulders creep up, the slightest signals of his discomfort. "How can you tell it's a dream when it feels so...?"

"Practice," says Johnny, and sits himself down on the floor opposite him. Chillier down here, part of him would much rather see about getting into the chair next to Tim, but he's way too much of an unknown for that. Plus he doesn't look like he'd necessarily be into that. "Honestly, I had so many fucked up dreams before I even got here, I was already kind of an authority. I guess I just - have a sense for it now. Or the rift gave me some kind of predisposition. That can happen, you know." He picks at the fraying cuffs on his thin hoodie. "People get new abilities sometimes, when they come through."

He lifts his head, chancing a look up at Tim. "This is actually a really good one," he says. "Shared one, like... this isn't your head, it's just a... neutral space. A lot of those are awful. Or they can be awful. This one..." He shrugs, looking around at the cabin. "This one's safe."

Dreams, huh. Yeah, Tim's had his share of those, and the only thing he wakes up with are headaches and a hope that he never remembers what's in them. It's an odd shared ground to have with someone. A shared ground he's going to leave undisclosed.

He relaxes incrementally when Johnny continues.

"Oh," he says, nodding a little. Whatever logic is at work here, well, he's going to hesitate to call it 'logic' in the first place. And Johnny's been...friendly, more or less, though Tim will hesitate to entrust him with any personal details. Personal details haven't led down good roads. "Well. That's good, I guess. That we're not in, you know, my head."

That's too much information. Fuck, he's trying to get away from everyone. It's what's safest. It's what's best.

Johnny nods, smiling faintly. "I know," he says. "I'm glad we're not in mine."

The comment can mean a lot of things, for both of them. Everyone has secrets - it's always mortifying to find someone else in your dreams. But Johnny kind of doubts it's just that. Tim's a little cagey, casual but cagey, and it takes a practiced pretender to spot it. He's not interesting in asking questions - he doesn't really want to have to reciprocate. But it's weirdly comforting all the same.

"Can I bum one of your duvets," he says, gesturing vaguely at the nest of blankets.

And there it is again, that weird sense of solidarity, like they've both seen the shit that sneaks right past the realm of logic or human understanding and looked at it without any choice in the matter and had to deal with it, and then been made to live with it afterwards. He feels like Johnny gets where he's coming from a little bit, but he's not basing a potential friendship on that. He's not basing potential friendships on anything, because potential friendships are just going to get more people killed, and it'll all be on his hands.

The reasonable thing to do would be to be off-putting and unfriendly until Johnny decides Tim's not worth his time. He's done it before. He's fucking excellent at it.

Tim tugs out his dwindling packet of cigarettes - do they count when they're in dreams? - and wearily lights one up, waving a have-at-it hand. "Yeah sure, man."

Johnny leans forward and pulls one of the various fluffy comforters - it's fucking cold down here, and all things considered he'd much rather have body heat, but that still seems like a no-go. He's got enough of a grip on himself not to drape over a person he's still getting to know, so to speak.

He nods at the cigarettes. "Can I bum one of those as well? They'll still be there when you wake up. Freebie." He smiles. He doesn't know entirely why he's being so friendly with this guy, just that... whatever he's picking up on, about him, between them, some kind of shared caginess, it's something he wants to hang onto if he can.

And maybe it's a little bit like the fucking puppy he couldn't save. Something so small and broken just like him. So important not to let it slip through the cracks.

He shrugs, and offers the packet with its cheap, sparse contents. Are dream cigarettes higher quality than the crap he's used to? Tim takes an experimental pull on his. Apparently not.

"Not bad," he admits finally, blowing out a curl of smoke and looking at the cabin's wood ceiling. "For a dream, I mean. Better than my usual." Anything's better than his usual. Suits, ties, faces without faces, the long dark tendrils of things that shouldn't exist.

Yeah, Tim prefers this.

Johnny takes a cigarette, lights it - at least he usually has his lighter in dreams - and leans back, for a moment just enjoying the disparity of two paranoid assholes smoking inside a cozy rustic cabin.

"Mine too," he says, "which is funny, because usually I'd be suspicious of any dream set inside a house. Some history there." He makes a vague gesture, like leaving that to your imagination. Fuck, this is almost fun. "But this one, I feel pretty safe. Sometimes that's the dream too, though. They can make you feel things."

So, that's not really comforting. Especially because he's pretty sure that's what's going on here. But he isn't too worried. Again, that's kind of - the point, isn't it? Man he should stop thinking about this.

"They make you feel things?" Tim straightens abruptly, brow furrowing in concern. Things like - what kinds of things? Things nestled in his head that don't belong? Cause, well, fuck, he's had just about enough of those. And not to mention the thing or things currently already in his head -

Fuck. He fucking knew these dreams would be bad news.

"How do you stop them?" he asks, a little too sharply given his earlier lax attitude about the whole thing. "I mean, can you just, like, wake up?"

Johnny remains more or less implacable in the face of Tim's distress, though he does wince, half sympathy, half regret for giving him one more reason to freak out. He takes another pull and releases the smoke toward the fireplace.

"There's one way that doesn't involve getting help from a supernatural entity," he says, "and we do have a few of those running around, and not all of them are helpful. But. The other method isn't one that I recommend." He doesn't really want to think about this. He stretches out, sighing heavily.

"You can die," he says. "In dreams. That makes you wake up. But, uh, again, not recommended." How many times has he done it now? He should count that out, but he suspects it would be awful and depressing.

"Look, sometimes the mood shifting... thing, it's exactly as fucked up as it sounds." He pulls his blanket up a little more snugly. "Sometimes, it's just... what it is. Dreaming we're all in a scary forest, we're all scared, even though nothing fucking happened in that one." Well, almost. "Dreaming we're in a safe, friendly cabin, and we all feel friendly and safe. It's just to go with the decor, so to speak."

He shrugs. Is this the apathy that comes with experience or part of the mood alteration? He can't even tell. "We kind of have to just make do and wait it out," he says. "These ones, the big shared ones, they tend to have a theme. This one is so fucking innocuous - fireplaces, blankets, couches everywhere - it's like a giant sleepover. Trust me. Enjoy it while you can. Because there are so many things that are so much worse."

Again, not helping. He sighs and laughs dryly. "Sorry," he says. "I'm just, you know. Trying to prepare you. Nobody prepared me." He sounds like a grizzled war veteran. He makes the executive decision to shut up.

For a terrifying minute Tim's fingernails sink into the unresisting fabric of the armchair and he looks about wildly, feeling less relaxed now and more like something trapped, caged. It's the panic born from expecting to see that thing lurking in the corners of his vision, the blind spots in his head, the places he doesn't look because he knows what will be there when he does. There's the choking anxiety clawing up into his chest, drowning his lungs, constricting, and he has to release it in a bout of hasty coughing.

Agh. Fuck. It doesn't go away. Not even in dreams.

Of course it wouldn't go away in dreams. He's seen the wreck his head's been turned into, felt it firsthand; why would he assume he'd be any safer in some internalized space when it's the internal that's been the issue from the start? Stupid, Tim. Stupid, broken, thoughtless Tim.

The coughing fit subsides, and Tim forces himself to speak in a tone that's halfway level. "Just think maybe, uh." Maybe, what? Maybe he should've taken Alex's advice. Stupid Tim. Selfish Tim. He'd rather live in hell than save everyone else from the same. "Maybe it'd be safer if I woke up. Even if it means, you know." It's not like he hasn't tried. They put you in hospitals for that. But he'd had the right idea.

Johnny looks up, for the first time properly alarmed, when Tim starts coughing violently. That's right, he'd done that before, but he'd sort of assumed it was a smoker thing. This sounds worse. Like really, really sick.

And then he says that, and Johnny's eyes widen and you should know better, Johnny, then to just say something like that to someone when they remind you of you.

Abruptly, he leans over to the hearth, puts his cigarette out against the stone, tucks it behind his ear, and gets up.

"No," he says. "You're not doing that. Look man, I don't know what you've been through, it's obviously not good, but it's not worse than anyone else here. It took me a while to figure that out. You don't have a monopoly on being fucked up."

He feels his breath catch when he says that. Gabriel said that, to him. Gabriel was the first person who treated him like he wasn't so broken he was beyond repair.

Feeling mildly exposed after this small monologue, he jerks his chin at Tim and starts climbing onto the sofa beside him. "Shove over," he says. "We're gonna sit here and smoke and enjoy the stupid cabin, and wake up naturally." That's an order. Or something.

Maybe he doesn't. Maybe he's not the one who gets to decide what fucked up is. But maybe neither is Johnny. Because with Tim, it's not just Tim. It's everyone. It's whoever he touches, whoever he talks to, whoever he interacts with, and he's just the virus and everyone gets exposed.

Selfish of him. Selfish of him to think he could do this, start over, keep his head down. What is he doing? What made him think he could pull this off, fucking reinvent himself or whatever existential bullshit, when that thing has defined him and will always define him and will always follow him and will not stop for anything.

"Sometimes you don't go through stuff," he answers dully, with an enormous effort to drag his tone back into something level and conversationally acceptable. "Sometimes it's not done to you. Sometimes it's just that you're born with it, and you have to live with it, and it's all your fault." And it fucking sucks.

Johnny doesn't seem deterred, but Tim doesn't shift to make it easy for him. He keeps smoking and tries not to think of the dwindling medication in his hotel room.

Johnny is not deterred, and if Tim doesn't want to shove over as requested, then he's going to have to deal with Johnny sliding his skinny ass right in next to him, nestling under the blankets. He relights his cigarette and sits there, trying not to think about how hilarious they probably look, stoically sitting almost right on top of each other, being depressed. At least it's a lot warmer here. This is nice, right? Tolerably nice.

"I'm sorry," he says. Gabe's line didn't work right away on him, either - hell, it's still not working a lot of the time - but that doesn't mean it isn't worth saying. He sinks into the couch a little, getting more comfortable. "Whatever it is, maybe it came with you, and maybe it didn't. I do know... how you feel. I think." He reaches out and taps ash onto the floor. "Things can be different, though. They are for me. And I never thought they would be." Maybe that's not helpful from where Tim's sitting, but it's all he knows to say.

Johnny is way closer than Tim's comfortable with, but, fine, he sort of brought it on himself by refusing to budge in the first place. He keeps smoking doggedly, staring ahead.

"Maybe," he says, and suddenly he gets why Jay was so damn sick of everyone being fucking cryptic all the time. He's being forced to do the same for the sake of some protective measure, except it's not like that's even really going to work. Johnny probably doomed himself the second he walked up to that disheveled, disoriented guy in the tan jacket and offered him a smoke and a bored 'welcome to your life' spiel.

"It's not as easy when you're the source." Which sounds vaguely threatening, but maybe it should. Tim is a threat. The source. The cancer. Cut him out, and everything still bleeds.

Fair enough. Johnny sighs softly and smokes in silence for a while.

"Well," he says, "I can help you with keeping to yourself. Money's not a problem, like I said. I get it from someone who can basically make it out of thin air, and he doesn't really care what I do with it, so."

That feels a little like too much, but it's better than the alternative of just letting Tim wonder exactly why he's throwing money around, or if he will eventually ask for something in return. Gabe supplies him with more than he needs - he's never been in the habit of spending a lot of money, he still grocery shops like a poor person, so. If he can help someone with it, he might as well.

"You can't be invisible," he says, nodding around them. "But you can stay out of the way. I've been pretty good at lying low in my time, so. I'm happy to help."

He remembers the part of his book where he went off on a massive fictionalized tangent about his miraculous doctor friend who took him in and healed all his wounds and put him back on the right track. Pages of that, and then snapping at whatever readers who bought it for buying such a fucking stupid fairytale.

And here he is, offering some half-version of it.

Life is funny.

It's weird, it's startling, it's a little off-putting, and it's - nice? to have that kind of innate feeling of yeah, so maybe he kind of gets it. Of course, it's dangerous as hell, which is maybe why it's weirdly reassuring. Johnny's not gonna push it. He knows not to. That's good.

Which means he's probably already fucked.

"Thanks," he says finally, because he honestly doesn't know what else he can say in response to that. Maybe it comes off a little gruff. Maybe it should. Fuck, why is he still here? Why is he the one who lived?

That's a useless thing to think here, now, with this person, with this supposedly new life that feels almost the same because it's dull and it's hidden in hotels and it's terrifying, and that's exactly how it should be.

"I know it's, it's weird right now." Like that covers any of it. It's an idiotic defense mechanism, like, maybe if he's vague about the monsters, the monsters can't get him. Yeah. Right fucking on. "It's just - I'm just - not the safest person. To be around."

"I get it," says Johnny, more or less gently, letting his eyes slide over to Tim. "But I'm not too safe myself. I figure it balances out."

He taps ash again, then takes another thoughtful drag, attempts to blow a smoke ring, fails. "You don't have to explain shit," he says. "It's okay. I'm just borrowing a cigarette, and I'm cold, and I didn't want to sit alone." That's all this has to be.

"All right." He nods shortly. All right. They can be their self-isolating asshole selves, and then they can both wake up and hopefully forget all of it. Johnny's not safe either - not safe how? What kinds of things does he see when he looks over one shoulder?

Too-tall men with too-long arms, faces that stare and smirk without eyes or mouths, emotions so alien they hurt his head and bleed out his nose, the thin slips of shadows of things that should not should not could not exist because they don't make sense -

Tim's safer not being safe. Well. Everyone else is safer. And that's better.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Sweeter than the First Time [Open to All]

WELL HOW DARE U

gaaah

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

tw: suicide mention

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject