sound and fury drown my heart, every nerve is torn apart [open to multiple]

[lottawork]

[warning: this dream deals with claustrophobia, hydrophobia/drowning, suicide ideation, mental invasion, alien abduction, and related medical squicks.]

where is the ship

Immediately Rush knows where he is, and the thought fills him with indescribable horror.

He would struggle but he can only drift without purchase, resist without means for resistance. He has no cognitive self-defense. His mind is flayed and open - they have stripped his neurological architecture bare and reassembled it with fascinated laziness, they have analyzed everything he is biologically, fundamentally, psychologically, they know his blood type and the sensation of a hammer slamming over his fingers in the steel mills of Glasgow and the disordered burst of sympathetic nervous overload that generates panic. They've shredded into his head, they've come shrieking into his silence; nothing can be kept in isolation as they eviscerate his subconscious, invade each molecule, unmake his construction, unbury his core, shear into what he cannot hide from them, intimately, with sleek, strategic tendrils of thought that are alien, malformed, wrong.

He is floating in a tank of ionized water in a spectrum of blue-silver-grays. He's kept nothing from them, save what they want to know most.

where is the ship

There is the weight of water pressing down and all around him, the dull tingle of cold against the bare skin of his neck, head, arms. The thing keeping him alive is wrapped around his face and rammed partially down his throat, a silver breathing apparatus clamped over his mouth, silencing him, muzzling him. He is floating in a tank of ionized water and wishing he could breathe the water, fill his lungs with blissful icy fluid and end the endless sequence of prolonged neural attacks. That language, their language, is high-pitched and chittering and utterly unintelligible, an irradiating aural torment that sluices into the layers of his brain tissue and strangles his dread into utter numbness, they will never allow him death, they will never allow him death, they will never allow him death.

He is floating in a tank of ionized water, freezing and alone and psychically paralyzed. One hand slams against the vitreous walls of the tank in frenzied, fruitless desperation, the distressingly impenetrable surface spread beneath his fingers. He hammers at his prison and wishes he could drown.

where is the ship

The water is ionized. The water is conductive. The water is transparent, and so is the glass. A silvered flare of bubbles flutters upward, darting between the tubes trailing out from the subcutaneous entry points beneath his clavicle. Every movement is hopelessly inhibited by the thickness of water resistance, pulling at his clothes and his hair as they fan out in slow drifts. He remembers breaking out. He remembers his prison shattering under application of blunt force and pressure, and he remembers tearing away the mess of tubing and the breathing mechanism and the telepathic entry point stapled to his head, and he remembers wriggling free, getting on a ship, getting out. He remembers this. He remembers it. He remembers Manhattan. It must have happened. It must have. So much has elapsed since then, that cannot all have possibly been manufactured. Unless he has simply never left, and they courteously let him believe otherwise. They could have distorted his perception of that. They're capable of it.

He breathes through a breathing apparatus in a tank of ionized water and his only defense is his hatred of his captors.

where is the ship

They leave him in aching silence. Time drags. It's impossible to tell its passing, until Rush can finally reconstruct his bearings, his physical position, his own name. He is floating in a tank of ionized water, and this time he has no escape. If he were allowed an open mouth, he would howl. If he could thrash at his confinement, he would slam himself into the clear walls with claustrophobic ferocity. All he can do, now, is knock an open hand feebly against the glass and wait for dissolution.

[ooc: this is a recurring nightmare for Rush, so just pick a date if you tag in for dream-y funtimes. For context: Rush has been kept on an alien ship for some time and he sure would like to get off that wild ride. The aliens that took him look like this - cw for unnaturally tall or skinny things - and he's being held in a thingy that looks like this - cw for people jars.]

Comments

Shall we say August 19th/20th, post-TARDIS party?

[wildmage_daine]

This is no dream of hers. She might have nightmares of cages and confinement, but hers are white-walled, not made of dingy metal. And she has some measure of freedom, here, unlike the two-legger suspended in the tank before her. Is he the dreamer? Is he even alive? His eyes are shut, and the horrible mess of tubing around his head looks as if it could be killing him as much as providing him with air.

Wait. His hand moves, his palm pressing against the glass in a way that looks deliberate.

Daine doesn't remember approaching the glass. She's just standing right in front of it, sudden-like. She glances around, as if expecting to be reprimanded for what she's only considering, but there is no one else here - at least for the moment. So she lifts her hand and gently raps her knuckle against the glass opposite his palm.

excellent!

[lottawork]

The cold and utter silence are almost welcome compared to everything else, but as Rush drifts and waits in shuddering, darkened apprehension, something taps back in answer. Rush's response is frantic and immediate, dragged into slowness as it is by the pulling of water against his skin and clothing. Both hands press against the glass, pushing at the misted pane, trying to communicate without true means of communication, oh god, help him, please.

He can't see past the intermittent clouds of bubbles and the exterior layer of condensation, but the shape opposite him is - too small, entirely unlike the eerily slender shapes of his captors. Human, then? Human, please. Help him, please.

[wildmage_daine]

Daine starts at the response, that sudden shift from stillness to frantic motion. Whoever he is, he's very much alive and clearly terrified. Mithros, who does this to a person?

The longer she waits, the more likely she is to find out. Daine shuts her eyes and reshapes her forehead into something smooth and grey and bulbous, then clicks her tongue and listens to the echo, assessing the glass's thickness and strength. How hard does she have to hit it to break it? How hard can she hit it without also hurting the man inside?

She thinks she has it, and she lets go of the dolphin forehead and steps up close to the glass. "Move back," she says, as loudly as she dares. "Can you hear me? Move back."

That's all the warning she can give him. At least, if she aims low, she's less likely to actually hit him. Daine steps back a few paces, giving herself room to change into the heavy, slab-muscled shape of a buffalo. Overkill, perhaps, but it's the males of most smaller species that tend to get the best horns, and it'll be a poor rescue if she knocks herself silly or gets bowled over by the outrushing water.

She leans her forehead against the glass, testing, listening to it creak beneath her weight. It won't take much. She draws back a scant few inches, braces her hooves against the floor, and slams her head forward with a grunt. The effect is dramatic and immediate; she has to shut her eyes against the sudden deluge of broken glass and water bucketing down onto her head and rushing around her hooves.

[lottawork]

Whatever is occurring on the other side of the glass is beyond Rush's clear range of vision, or hearing. There's the dull press of water over his ears and the faint electrical hum of whatever machinery they're using to keep him alive, and beyond that, nothing. The shape behind the glass changes, shifting into something really fucking massive, and Rush can exercise only minimal leverage to push himself away from the surface in alarm.

When his enclosure splinters, his reaction is relieved, panicked, and immediate. He spills out from the shattered prison along with the water, tumbling and rolling, fingers threading desperately through the tangle of tubing to yank the things away regardless of stinging pain each motion induces. The breathing apparatus comes next, wrenched from its grip over his face after those awful moments of pointless, frenzied scrabbling, and the telepathic implant is pried from where it clings to his temple.

Rush's breath tears out in ragged pants, "fuck - fuck - fuck - " as each wire and pipe is sequentially removed.

He scrambles against the slippery mess of glass and wet floor, succeeding only in propping himself partially against the smooth curve of the ship's wall. His waterlogged clothing clings to him and his feet are bare - didn't they take his fatigues? but then his memory of what they've done is both mercilessly sharp and forgivingly clouded, and he lacks the state of mind to examine it. The air that fills his lungs still feels stale, recycled, but the pressing mass of water is gone, and he's out, and he's fucking free of the open doorway into his head. Relief sweeps into him in an overpowering surge, mingled with the rifting panic of whether or not he has truly gotten out. When his terrified gaze comes to rest on his rescuer, Rush can only struggle to back away, uselessly, pinned as he against the wall of the ship. It's a fucking buffalo, and his tiny glow of hope immediately plummets back into hollow despair.

Not real.

He's never left. He's still in there, and they're letting him believe he's free. Fuck. No. How does he break this? How does one disrupt an illusion?

[wildmage_daine]

Once it's safe to open her eyes and she sees that he's out, Daine steps back, shaking her head to rid herself of excess water and bits of glass. He seems to know what he's doing when it comes to getting all that stuff off of himself, so she leaves him to it. She also holds onto the buffalo shape, at least for the moment. It might be better to stay imposing in case one of his captors shows up.

Unfortunately, that means she's imposing to him, as well. Daine flicks her ears back and ducks her head a little when she notes the way he's trying to scramble away from her.

It's all right, she says, trying to at least sound reassuring. I'm not going to hurt you. My name is Daine. I got you out. She turns her head to examine him with one large, brown eye. Are you okay? Can you stand? She'd rather be asking where they are and how they leave, but first things first.

[lottawork]

"Oh fuck," he whispers, is all his fully capable of whispering, repeatedly, as he unsuccessfully attempts to crab away. Fuck. Fuck, no. Has he never left? Is he still there? What are they deliberately imposing on him? Escape attempts growing progressively more ludicrous and unbelievable, and he'll acquiesce to the obvious scenario each time, if only for the relief of allowing himself to believe he can get out, however briefly.

The words that hit him aren't spoken aloud, and Rush shrinks away immediately. No. No more voices in his head. Fuck. No, fuck, please, no more, no more. His brain has become that neurological stomping ground for every lifeform, hallucinatory or otherwise, that comes across him, and that will not be sustainable. Even if they sound human, not the awful shrieking, high-pitched scratches across his ear, Rush knows, empirically, this can't exist. He's still inside. He must be. He always is.

"Don't -" he says raggedly, swiping uselessly with one poorly coordinated arm in a wordless need for his brain to be left in merciful silence. He stumbles on, inanely, as if expecting a concrete answer, "are you one of them?"

[wildmage_daine]

This is bad. He's still all panicked despite her reassurances. She supposes a talking buffalo is a lot to swallow, even if she did break him out of that thing he was in. Daine shuffles back a few steps with a heavy sigh, then changes back to her human shape, her hands held up peaceably.

"I'm not sure who 'they' even are," she says, "but I'm not going to hurt you, if that's what you're worried about. I only took buffalo shape to get you free."

She gives her shirt a pointed tug, adding, "None of this is real, anyway, if that helps. We're dreaming."

[lottawork]

Rush would cry out in alarm if he still had the wherewithal to do so, but he's capable only of a gasp and a pathetic, staggered whimper. Whatever's happening, he only has the most tenuous grasp of it, and after so prolonged a period of acute mental distress he has no means for pinning down an equilibrium.

"You -" He begins, then his eyes snap shut. Dreaming. Dreaming dreaming dreaming. He clings to that, makes that his desperate, agonized litany. What about Manhattan. "Where are we? Outside of - we're outside of this? We exist outside of - please tell me we - that this isn't real." His voice cracks humiliatingly. Please let this be the simulation, and not the simulator.

He's shivering, both from the cold and from the shock of overstimulation after being kept so long in what virtually equated to a sensory vacuum. Standing is somewhat beyond his ability but perhaps - if this is not real they cannot stay here, and if it is real they need to leave as soon as is remotely possible.

[wildmage_daine]

Daine sinks into a crouch, putting herself more on his level. She wishes she had a towel or something to offer him, but this isn't her dream, and she doesn't dare approach him when he's in this state. Maybe if he was an animal, she'd risk it, but her magic won't work on a two-legger. He might lash out at her, or she might just scare him half to death. Frankly, he looks halfway there already. She's staying put.

"We're in Manhattan," she says, pitching her voice the way she would if he was a scared, injured animal she was trying to treat. "New York. The rift brought us there. That's real. This is a dream. Yours, I'd guess." She frowns thoughtfully. His voice isn't familiar, but his face is. She's seen him before. She's seen him recently. She just can't place it.

August 15/16 [same triggers as the post as well as choking, physical abuse, and stabbing]

[johnny_truant]

The foreign dream snaps him up hard and without mercy, taking him from his usual dark drifting and plunging him into water so cold it feels like waking up. He's submerged and suspended, his limbs flailing in slow arcs of motion through the lit blue water, extending outward only to find he's trapped in some kind of fucking fishbowl prison, barely enough room for even his small body, he's going to drown, he's going to drown again, except he's not, he's still breathing, slow and panicked against the pressure of water on his chest. There's something clamped around his face, jammed into his mouth and down his throat, and he panics, what is it, what is it, fingers scrabbling at the apparatus, trying to pull it off. No, fuck, wait, don't do that, that's what's keeping you alive, but why, where the fuck are you?

He sees them, then, outside the glass of his cell, three figures, unquestionably inhuman, staring at him with bright blank eyes, long and ghost-thin and probing. Fuck, has he literally been abducted by aliens, is this actually happening right now?

He reaches out and presses his palm to the glass, and as if in response one of the creatures lurches forward, opening its grotesque maw and releasing a shrill animal sound, something Johnny hears muffled through glass and water, and something he hears much clearer and sharper like a knifepoint inside his head, and it hurts. He wants to scream but he can't, can only struggle in suspension, curling up and pressing his hands to his head, reaching through the web of cables attached to him. Oh god, no, no, no, they're in his head, he can feel them in there, carding through his memories just like he does and he feels every single penetrative glance as though someone were forcibly pushing his own memories up to the surface: there's his mother, hands around his throat; there's Raymond, bruising and breaking him; there's the storage room in the tattoo parlor, bulb burns out with a pop, no, not this, not his own false fucking memories, nonono please please

They page through events more recent, force him to relieve the sharp pain of Zagreus breaking his hand, Gabriel smirking as he sinks a knife into his Topher's gut, stop, stop, please, fucking stop it!

The noise gets worse, lashing against him, punishing him for his resistance, maybe. They're dragging him back now, into the house, the one he sees in his head, isn't it funny how all his hallucinations are just laid out flat like this, as real as the physical memories? He arches back violently in physical protest, and surges again, pounding both his hands against the glass. They're so curious about that, a place remembered but never seen, all that strange architecture that doesn't conform to reality, he can feel them examining so carefully, leaving an agonizing sting under his skin, a ringing in his skull.

He slams his hands against the glass again, can't crack it, can't

except he can

He levels a hard stare at the creatures, and one of them falters back as a crack appears, ripping right through the middle of the glass.

Not today, fuckers.

The window splits and shatters, spilling him out on a wave of water and broken glass, and immediately his hands are tugging at the cables, pulling that thing out of his mouth, snapping the others off him, each one leaving a sharp spike of pain, but he doesn't care.

The creatures are scrambling back, chittering frantically at each other, and Johnny picks himself up, breathing slow and labored. He doesn't know what they are, what they want, and he doesn't give a hot shit. Waterlogged and trembling from the cold, he steps toward them and shreds the floor as he goes, making them stagger and fall. Fuck them. He turns away.

Everything in the room is space-age bullshit, where is the door, is there one? Fuck it, he'll make his own. Not even bothering to touch the walls, he tears at the structure of this place with indifferent fury. It's not a house, too foreign for that, and for once he doesn't care what becomes of it. This isn't his dream, it's somebody else's, and he's willing to bet that someone is in a prison just like that, having their brain picked over. Fuck that noise. Not while he's in here with them.

He picks up a pipe. Looks like a pipe, anyway. Some piece of torn-up whatever. It'll do.

He steps through the hole he's made in the wall and hey, look at that, identical room, another prisoner, Johnny can see him floating and struggling, wired up just like he was. There's a lot more tall blue fuckers in here, and several of them are already watching him as he comes in. There's a moment of collective silence.

"Listen up, kids," he tells them. His eyes dart over to the guy in the tank, doesn't know him, but that doesn't matter at all. "I'm in a real bad mood and you fuckers don't scare me." He hefts the pipe like it's a fucking sword. "Now back the fuck up."

[lottawork]

Breath rattles flat and tinny in the metal chokehold snaked over his mouth, or it is the distorted thundering of his own blood and heart, or it is simply the breaking and the agonizing tear of mnemonic evisceration. Repeated. Repeated. Repeated. Again.

where is the ship

Everything else has been hollowed from him, all the bristling edges of his subconscious and the lingering ache of grief, everything he is and was is theirs, but it doesn't matter and Rush doesn't care, because they will never extract what they want from him and he will never surrender Destiny. This is all he has. It is all that's left. Their efforts redouble. They swell and swarm at his head in a forked incision, bright and bladed and newly threaded, stabing in through the open door they've made of his head. Rush has no access to a mouth to scream.

The dull rumble does not immediately register - it is a shift in water pressure, or a new form of neural torture specifically designed to submerge his thoughts in unreality. He ignores it, shrinks his mind uselessly into itself and waits for them to breach that defense in a fresh calculated surge.

It does not come.

Nothing comes. Water-warped shapes shift beyond the glass in pale silhouette, fanning away, and there is unbearable shrieking and clicking as their collective minds wrench out of his and waver toward something else, something beyond the range of Rush's vision or thought but he does not care, and alone and in the cold he has no weapon or defense. He can do nothing but strain through the stinging water to see the shapes, and retreat into his wreckage of a psychological defense.

[johnny_truant]

Okay, so maybe he didn't think this through. He takes a wild swing at the aliens and clobbers a couple of them at once, weak little fuckers, but then there's a another surge into his brain, digging into him with even less subtlety than before, and he wavers, almost collapsing to the floor, keeping himself up with the pipe. No, no, no. Fuck! He only realizes he's screaming when he feels the pain in his throat. There's so many of them and they're all crowding into his head, he slides back and presses himself to the wall. Get out, get out.

This is not for you.

His knees buckle and he goes down, but as soon as his hand touches the floor he rends it apart with all his remaining energy. It hurts, it hurts so much, like it never has before, but the painful grasp on his thoughts slips and he wrenches himself back hard. No more fucking around.

He lets the floor crack and seize all around him, knocking the creatures down, forcing them to constantly scramble for balance, keeping them busy while he pulls himself up, his head pounding, his skin burning. He walks through the chaotically shifting room like it's nothing, god he had no idea how hard it was to keep this shit going, but he has to, just a little while longer. The shrieking of the aliens tears into him as he approaches the man in the glass chamber.

He puts his hand against the glass, trying to make eye contact. Then he removes the glass altogether. As though it was never there.

Water drains through the cracks in the floor and immediately lights start to flicker like he just dumped a coffin full of water all over the internal wiring of this place. Not exactly the best plan but it wasn't really a plan at all, so.

His grip on the room slips, the floor resettles, but before they can right themselves he turns on the creatures and swings the pipe viciously, tearing into them, knocking them down.

[lottawork]

The erratic screeching and snarling and popping of the assembled them intensifies, agitated, sparking something almost uninterpretable - fear?

The trails of their influence blaze in alarm, blue and glaring against his circuitry, detectable even in the fundamental differences of physiology. His orientation of the room is growing ever more skewed, irregular. His grasp of time was the first to slip formlessly away in such a state of physical-sensory inertia, and now space is simply fucking itself over of its own fucking accord. Something smaller, more recognizable and quantifiable as human approaches the glass and it must be human, this becomes quite transparent as Rush meets eyes that are like his, dark and terrified, but how, how is this possible, there is no one left to save him and no one who would -

Rush waits for the bite of fresh thought to soak through the tired fragments of his mind, or for the creaking and groaning and merciful shattering of glass, but neither occur. Neither - or both, possibly, because suddenly without sound or force the water is crashing free and he goes spilling out with it, fingers already weaving up to unhook from around his mouth the sleek metal instrument that once kept him alive. The first breath he seizes is ragged and wheezing, and in the next he untangles himself from the mass of tubes and cables wired into him. Each release is a fresh pinprick of pain but he grasps at the sensations eagerly, hungrily, they are what make him human and sane and they are proof that he is not still trapped and caged, they are the proof of what he is and pain that is physical is far, far preferable to the pain that is not.

The room he has been kept in, Rush immediately notes when he sees the uneven ruptures cobwebbing the ground beneath his fingers, is in a complete state of disarray, a disordered wreck befitting the mind of the man it held. And then, most unexpectedly, there is a man beside him - soaking, equally disheveled, wielding a pipe of all things and smashing it into each chattering enemy with incredible, purposeful alacrity.

But several of them fixate on him, on them both, glistening eyes flaring greedily. His mind ignites with a vibrating hum and it is both an overwhelming agony and a blessed relief to scream, howl, curl and thrash against the floor like a living thing and not a specimen kept suspended in fluid stasis. But this is pain without purpose, they want nothing from him, no locations or coordinates - they simply want him to sink out of consciousness, back into a manageable state.

This is how they read his mind.

He must get it off.

Motor control is equally excruciating, slow and wracked with ragged spasms and twitches as his nervous system buckles beneath the overpowering parietal pressure slamming into his skull. But one hand drags its way to his head and he slides a victorious fingertip beneath the hard metal clinging to his temple, peels it off, flings it aside viciously, and the burden of their unintelligible mental howls lessens. The other man - his rescuer, Rush is coming to understand, however little sense it makes - has not removed his transmitter. He is open and exposed to what they may do to him, and as they turn their minds away from Rush and to the only other target in the room, he knows they have already begun to do it.

[johnny_truant]

The dreamer doesn't get any time to enjoy his freedom before they're at him again, judging by the way he's screaming, and it only makes Johnny angrier, whipping his pipe back and forth so hard he almost throws out a shoulder. He's taken out more than he expected to by the time they get into him again, suddenly, the shift comes fast and he goes down hard, scraping his knees on the floor and choking out a thin, wrenching moan. His hand flexes around the pipe, loosening and then tightening his grip, but he can't get back up, the press on his headspace is so unforgiving. His vision starts to blur as he blinks down at his hands, thinks for a moment they're trapped in the floor again, or are they just pulling that memory out of him, playing it back, oh god, oh god he can't move

He curls inward tightly, releasing his weapon to grip instead at his head, screaming. They're going to break him. They're going to pull him apart. He can't move, he can't move.

tw: violence strangulation violence, gore and npc death

[lottawork]

They cluster around the other man in a staggered semicircle, targeting the one who is either the more vulnerable or more dangerous of the two; they know Rush's patterns too intimately, they have subdued him too well and too often to regard him as anything other than a potentially useful nuisance.

Does the thought come from him or from the mental residue of their violation of his head, and does it truly matter.

Rush's teeth grit on a painful edge but the feeling is his, organic, not forged from an invasion of neurons and self. The discarded pipe is too far from his hands, but he has never needed it. He has done this. He remembers.

His surge of motion is unstable and his balance wobbles, but his hands make an unerring arc for the thin neck of the nearest one of them, fingers closing tightly around the filmy blue skinlike tissue stretched over fragile bone. The thing folds easily beneath him as his momentum carries them both crashing to the cracked floor. It writhes at him, wiry and powerful, pressing sticklike claws for fingers against soaked skin, but Rush has taken it by surprise, made it helpless against his comparatively superior mass. It is not a difficult act to break what passes for the thing's throat. It is all thinness and soft bone, if it has bone at all. It snaps under the tightening pressure of his fingers, and the whole of it lies still.

The others spit and turn their furious attention to him, but Rush lacks the open telepathic gateway his rescuer has foolishly not yet removed. He hears their heads nudging angrily against his, and he makes a noise that is both a howl and snarl as he throws himself viciously upon the next, dashing its bulging oblong head against the torn edges of what was once a smooth ship wall, leaving a wet trail of lurid blue smeared there.

[johnny_truant]

The pressure ripples off him a little, enough that he can twist to see the other man tearing the aliens apart with his bare fucking hands. All right, that's one way to do it. He doesn't blame the guy. He wants to help. If he can just - he gropes for his pipe and feels another stab of mental pain, fuck, how does this guy stand it? - but he manages to close his hand around the weapon and haul himself back up.

"Fuck off!" he screams, taking out several at a time with one clean swing. They're still tearing at him, shrill screams cutting through his mind, but he doesn't need t think, he only needs to hit, enraged, energized yells with each successful strike. One of them latches its freakish hands around his arms and another seizes his face, it's a loose grip, these things have no strength at all, but it doesn't matter; they're a lot taller than Johnny and they have the advantage of cutting hard into his mind, leaving him limp and quivering in their clutches. The pipe clatters to the floor and he staggers, held up only by his aggressors.

"No," he gasps, trying to turn his head, unable to shake the creature's grip over his face. "Stop - stop!"

MORE VIOLENCE

[lottawork]

They've fallen into disorganization, separating under the unexpected display of brute force, the efficiency with which he dispatched two of their own. He rounds on the next few, snatching at the precious seconds of boiling ferocity he still has before shuddering panic overtakes all rational thought. This method of elimination is not rational but it is effective, he has employed it in the past, and with a low, bestial noise he lunges for them again.

They are ready for him. Weak as they are, they grasp at him with spindly fingers that arch his back and send his nerves stabbing into sheer sensory overload - even compared to near-complete sensory deprivation, that was preferable to how they claw at him now, attempt to hold him down at reattach his transmitter and bare him again to their mercies.

He strains mindlessly at them, all savage twisting and adrenalized strength, one arm freeing itself and battering the looming threat of the transmitter away then kicking out at insect-thin legs, unbalancing them, scattering them.

They are not fucking taking him back.

This is critical. This is his psychological fulcrum. They are not taking him back.

His brain has endured too much, however much he may deserve it, and he -

- is not going back.

They will have to kill him.

Their fingers are thin and fragile, quickly torn away, and Rush launches himself at the grappling figure, the only other human in the room. This is not particularly a rational course of action either, as it would be advisable for Rush to simply leave now while he still possesses the means and wherewithal to do so, but there is very little in this or any other universe that would allow him to willingly subject another to that brand of mental distress at their hands. They are all tall, slender, hopelessly ill-equipped for any sort of physical struggle - naturally their telepathic advantage had to evolve from somewhere, of course, fucking naturally, that is more or less the general way of things - and Rush brings down the one pulling at the other man's face with an elbow looped around its neck, in what may have qualified as a chokehold were it in any way human.

It isn't.

He plants his knee into its delicate spine, forces it downward, and applies careful pressure until he feels something vital break.

mmmorning August 24?

[theoldgirl]

The TARDIS has inadvertently gathered quite a bit of experience identifying and alleviating human nightmares found in the telepathic current. It's unfortunate, what human minds do to themselves, but also natural, so she doesn't usually concern herself with them. Sometimes, though, she comes across a familiar mental presence, a small pinprick of consciousness that she hates to see suffer, and she helps. Because that's what the Doctor and her have always done.

Rush's mind generally seems to be in a near constant state of stress, of frustration or aggravation or anxiety, judging by the few times she's seen it. But this is so much worse than that. This is sheer horror and fear and agony radiating hotly, searingly into the telepathic current and she's worried immediately. There are far too many creatures who seek to attack people in their dreams here, and she's not going to let Rush be hurt in her presence a second time.

She touches his mind cautiously, first of all taking a look around for any outside influence. As she does so she projects her human form doing the same, a slow turn on the spot to scan the scene. He is obviously dreaming about a ship, architecture and technology not resembling anything she's ever seen from humanity in her own universe. Could this be his ship, the one she would have so liked to meet? No, a moment later she has sifted through his roil of emotions and sees that this is profoundly alien and terrifying to him. At least she can't detect another mind, this is all his own pain.

She finishes her look around and faces Rush himself, trapped in a sort of semi-conscious stasis. It's not the sight of the contraption that dismays her so much as the feelings of stifling, blinding confinement and torturous helplessness. He doesn't need to be suffering any of that. Unfortunately she wasn't made to make precise changes in human minds outside of her translation function, so she can't easily brush all this aside and place him somewhere more pleasant. But she can very much encourage his mind to do so on its own.

The TARDIS steps up to the glass and places a hand where his is twitching desperately. When she speaks, her voice carries perfectly through the glass and the fluid. "Nicholas, you are dreaming. You don't need to be here." She spreads a calming sense of safety and wide open spaces over his panic, complete and tightly knit as a blanket, seeking to quell his terror like flames. "You are not trapped."

sounds good to me!

[lottawork]

The shape that exists beyond the glass - things exist beyond the glass, of course they do, why would they not exist beyond the hellish mental landscape of his own head - is not tall enough or distorted enough or emaciated enough to belong to what he initially assumes it must belong to. It appears human, even if recognizability is entirely lost in the warping of liquid density and vitreous substance. The calm that begins to needle at him does not originate from him, it is some exterior manufactured emotion that Rush does not need and it is both his immediate reaction to begin slamming up neurological barriers and the source of his escalating dread that he is no longer able to. They've shattered his neural makeup beyond that sustainable point.

Is he no longer capable of conscious thought. Has his mind become so desperate for any form of release, regardless of whether it truly exists, that it needed to fabricate the illusion of calm or escape or freedom or breath simply so that it may remain decently, marginally, somewhat workable?

Is this yet another foreign intrusion or his only means for escape, however figurative, and how does one differentiate.

It is not until he can reduce his state of terror enough to analyze the voice that he understands it, accepts it, hears it and recognizes it and the vast mental strain of supporting his head in its perpetual condition of horrified panic breaks in utter relief. He may question the reliability of this projection, if it is a projection, and whether this is truly a separate individual or something created out of his own head, but Rush doubts he could reproduce the TARDIS with all her capabilities with any accuracy, and he doubts they would have the understanding of her to do so either.

His hand stills against the glass. It is difficult to re-regularize breathing through an apparatus, where oxygen is already regulated and given in constant measurements, enough to keep him alive, but he allows the projected sensation of safety to drown away his overpowering fear of this confinement. It occurs to him that he has every reason to doubt that any of this exists in reality - but he can no longer find it within him to care. Even illusory release is a form of release.

[theoldgirl]

It's very regrettable, though not surprising, that his first reaction to her help is yet more fear and resistance. But his mind has already wrought itself into such exhaustion that his brief struggle barely even registers against her gentle but firm influence, and then he stills and she feels his relief. There, see, no reason to be afraid. She's only suppressing his panic for now, she can't just erase it, but once he's calmed down more he should be able to regulate his emotions himself. That will be healthier and more stable, too.

Releasing him from his perceived prison might also help. He is too worn out and passive to break out on his own, not like Johnny did when she'd soothed his nightmare, but his weakness means the setting is a little more easily suggestible than when he had a tight utterly panicked hold on it. She doesn't bother with the control panel behind her, doesn't concern herself much with the internal consistency of this dream, instead carefully imposes a single thought; there is simply no more water. Evaporated, or drained, or whatever he expects of this context, but it is gone and he is dry and the glass slides out of the way with a hiss.

[lottawork]

It is a dark relief to ease away from the continuous looping, agonizing, self-sabotaging nature of his own constricting fear and allow some secondary influence to silence it, to the extent that Rush has no desire to track its etiology. The water drains and the glass soon follows in some kind of derealized blur of motion which he can neither delineate nor has an interest in doing so. The apparatus and wiring that were formerly the means for sustaining him are removed by trembling, waterlogged, disgusted rote, and he may stagger from his confinement, bracing against curved walls with their alien, clinical interior.

He is not panicking and must remind himself he is not panicking, but before he has completed that automatic mental affirmation it comes to his attention that he is not panicking, that his abused physiology has not responded in the typical fashion and is maintaining some precarious measure of calm, miraculously.

Rush sags against the wall in paralyzed confusion, taking note of his nervous system's immediate, shivering response to the possibly not-truly-existent temperature, before finally bringing his searching gaze to rest on the shape he now knows he recognizes.

"Why did you do that?" Fear is clouded by genuine perplexity, alarm over why the TARDIS is here and why she may have come to help him. Do they know she is here and what might they do if they found out?

[theoldgirl]

She steps aside to give him room to free and reorient himself, letting him work through a number of new emotions, mainly relief and confusion. They should start working on a different setting soon; his panic is still roiling and flaring underneath her influence and she'd really like to do something about that. Already some new anxiety is blooming into life, and it seems as though keeping his panic under control is like trying to put out a house fire.

Why wouldn't she do that? What an odd question and she frowns mildly, but speaks with nothing but patience. "I want to help. And there is really no need to be afraid, Nicholas. You're dreaming. You are not on this ship." Aside from not wanting him to suffer, he was hurt before because of her mistake and she hates it; she should not have let that leech-like creature inside. She'd failed to protect those under her care, and she refuses to let him be hurt again, even if it's just his own mind doing the hurting.

[lottawork]

His breath stutters out in ragged, jarring, exhausted relief as he shudders against the walls of alien make that are, evidently, the products of his own head. The heretofore unknown psychological spanner of dream is an angle Rush had not considered, and nestled within the manifold layers of unreality he has no method of determining which of those variegated striae are definite; the outside confirmation has made the truth of the matter forgivingly clear.

"This is -" Speaking comes with some difficulty - if this is not truly real his teeth should not be chattering but no amount of repeated insistence of the dream's nature seems to have any profound effect on this - "this isn't - it feels -"

He shakes his head, a tiny, jerking expression of his pained frustration with the apparently broken methodology of his own mind. The TARDIS, obviously, has a grasp of the psychical nature of things superior to his own, or to any human's. He trusts this evaluation, far more than he trusts the diametrically opposed conclusion his haptic input is screaming at him.

The floor beneath his feet trembles - perceptual error, Rush assumes, an unfortunate side effect to the disorientation of unexpected freedom from the fluid suspension of sensory deprivation. But the cold lighting in the ship flickers and the entire construct shakes, and this goes beyond standard dissociative sequelae.

[theoldgirl]

His mind really is quite invested in the integrity of this dream, though the telepathic current itself often seems to boost and linearize human dreams in that way too. He's shaking miserably and struggling to make sense of everything and it's just so unnecessary. Why is it never as simple as telling them they're dreaming? Humans are such stubborn little things. It really would be easiest to just wipe away the whole thing and project something new, but she is hesitant to increase her already rather forceful intrusion; it's so hard to gauge how much of her a human mind can bear.

She sighs and nods in acknowledgement of his half-expressed objection, yes, she can see how it feels. The sudden destabilization of the setting doesn't help, and it's another spike of panic that she barely catches before it can spread. She of course stands unaffected by the tremors, but he was already unsteady on his feet to begin with and so scared. So she reaches out to grasp his arm and offer support, speaking with sympathy but firmly, "Don't mind any of this, you are not going to get hurt. I'd like to take you somewhere else, come along." She tugs gently at his arm, confident that the dream is more likely to change on the move than if they remain standing right next to his awful prison.

[lottawork]

He must trust that this isn't real even if it feels real, because every passing moment has been nothing but a collection of nonexistent scenarios imposed upon him by a group of minds he does not understand and who do not understand him, scenarios that are not truly extant and are meant to yield any and all information he has and instead he has merely yielded what he is and they are not satisfied with that and it will never be enough, and Rush is placing the whole of his trust in the TARDIS and hoping that she is real and not some element extrapolated from his head and manifested in a form they believe he will understand. He must trust this.

He practically falls against the support she offers and holds to it despite the searing discomfort and he knows he must assume she is real but the possibility that she may not be terrifies him so completely that it has grown difficult to acquiesce to the command. He stumbles. His feet drag. He shivers, and the floor is growing ever more unstable.

"They get in your head," he whispers, whether by explanation or warning or utter non sequitur he cannot say, and he fixes her with a desperate, wild look. "Don't let them."