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

[lottawork]

"Manhattan." He pushes the hair from his eyes, an involuntary sweeping gesture to reestablish some state of equipoise, and nods shakily. He has third party confirmation. Thank fuck.

"Yes. This is - yes." Rush glances sharply at his surroundings, taking in the awful cold interior of the ship and - draws closer into himself, feeling never more pathetic than he does now, shoulders hunching and arms wrapping over his chest. "It's mine."

He's out. He's free. He got out, he's been out, he's fucking fine. The sensation of having his brain peeled into is still too sharp, feels too fucking real, and Rush recoils without any obvious exterior stimuli. His lungs are still gasping and he's having significant difficulty in forcing himself to remain still and calm like any rational human being.

"Can I change it?" he asks abruptly, locking terrified eyes with hers. Dream or not, manufactured environment or real - he can't be put at ease here, not with that swarming, powerfully associated memory of having his mind systematically invaded. "Can I just - fuck, can I alter this?" He indicates the ship with a trembling, jerking wave of one hand.

[wildmage_daine]

This seems like it ought to be progress, though she can't say she likes the way he's still all twitchy and curled in on himself. She doesn't make any move towards him, but she meets his gaze calmly when he looks at her. "Maybe," she says. Some folk are better than others at changing their dreams, and it doesn't sound as if he's tried it before. It could go either way, really. "If anyone can, it'd be you." She might be able to make little changes, but she's not sure how much anyone can do to another's dream unless they've got a power like Topher's. And considering how this fellow responded to her taking a shape, she's hesitant to try anything else.

[lottawork]

"I've never tried," he whispers, eyes sliding closed. And manipulation of his own environment would require, he assumes, a certain level of focus that Rush is having significant difficulty in achieving in any capacity. It's taking all of his mental energy to wrest his mind away from its propensity for descension into absolute panic, which would not be conducive to escape or relief in any fashion.

It's swallowing at him regardless, tightening his lungs and making concentration on his rescuer intensely difficult. No. This is not in any way contributing to progress, it is hindering that progress, and Rush needs to address this. He escaped once, before. He got off the ship and he got away from it, from them. He can do this again, surely. Even in a technically nonexistent environment.

"Right." Rush grasps at the ship walls for support, heaving himself to his feet in an ill-advised surge that leaves him trembling and dizzy, but he pushes onward and stumbles forward, regardless of the prickling of cut glass against his feet. "Right. It's possible. We simply need to - shift it." He's worryingly unsteady, wobbling and vertiginous in his effort to simply move and reattach feeling to his extremities and get away from the remains of his hateful enclosure.

[wildmage_daine]

Daine rises when he does, keeping a wary eye on him. He looks as if he might keel over at any moment. "Yes," she agrees. "I know it can be done; I've seen others do it."

And then he's staggering forward with all the grace of a newly born foal, and she steps forward to take his arm before he pitches face-first into some broken glass. "Careful, though. You don't want to fall on that," she says with a nod towards the mess. The rush of water has done a good job of dispersing the glass all over the room, or hall, or whatever this is suppose to be.

[lottawork]

Instinct has him jerking at the unexpected contact, but the unpleasant sensation of having his arm seized is far outweighed by the recent near-complete sensory deprivation, and the utter exhaustion of standing and moving and gritting his teeth and trying not to panic sends him skidding forward in a mortifying lack of motor control. He automatically fists one hand into the material of his rescuer's shirt for support, one poorly synchronized step from full collapse onto her shoulder. He half-twists, heart hammering, in a halfhearted attempt to pull away.

"Fuck -" Eyes screwed shut, still panting in a mental scramble to not lose the tenuous grasp he has on his own fraying sense of reality. "Sorry, sor - fuck."

[wildmage_daine]

Oh, bother. That tell-tale jerk doesn't go unnoticed, not to someone with as keen an eye for body language as Daine. He doesn't want her help - not because he's proud (though he might be, given the needless apologies), but because he just doesn't want her touching him. Trouble is, he needs her to keep him from pitching right over. Given the glass all over the floor, falling seems like a worse fate the momentary discomfort of her holding him up, so she shifts her stance to better support him.

"It's fine," she says quietly, trying to lessen the pressure of her hands on his arm without actually letting him go. "You're fine. It's just a dream." Maybe if she distracts him a little, that might help. At the very least, she might be able to learn more about what's going on here, in case he's not able to will them elsewhere. "What's your name? I'm Daine." She's told him that already, but she's not sure if it registered or not.

umm small panic attack, minor self-harm

[lottawork]

It's just a dream, and his nerves are on fire. He digs the heel of his foot into one of the glass shards, though lacking the requisite strength to break skin. The sharpness of the sensation of pain is his point of reference, around which he can reconstruct his perception of everything else. Nothing falls into place, frustratingly, but the disorientation following mental release is to be expected, the room spins briefly oh god oh fuck oh god oh god oh fuck fuck, with herculean effort, Rush draws himself back into some vague sense of actuality because dreams are entirely subjective and experience is subjective, he will endure this like he has endured all other retreads of this particular scenario, why can't he breathe.

"I'm Rush," he manages, the mechanical nature of typical social niceties such as name-exchanging somewhat mangled by how alarmingly his vision is swimming. The name of his rescuer, this time, doesn't slide mindlessly from awareness to the lack of, and he fixes onto it. "Nicholas Rush."

He sags there for a moment, waiting for the floor to bring itself to stillness. For fuck's - sake. This is not convenient. He can't go panicking now, and he's not, he's definitely not, this is well within his control, oh fucking christ. Rush casts his gaze around the silver-blue haze of the room desperately - how does he go about reshaping this when his mental faculties are so scattered and he himself is so freshly broken?

[wildmage_daine]

"Rush," Daine repeats dutifully. It seems strangely fitting, given how hard a time he's having calming down. He'll never be able to accomplish anything in this state, not until he manages to center himself a little.

Fortunately, Daine has some experience with this sort of thing.

"Rush," she says again, her tone calm and reasonable and devoid of judgment, "I'm going to help you steady your breathing, okay? And once you've got that settled, we'll work on the next thing." Then she pauses, waiting for confirmation. She's pretty sure her words are getting through, but she needs to be certain.

[lottawork]

"Yes," he says numbly, nodding, oh god he can remember what was done to him in every shearing detail, there's a scar over his chest and they put that there, they put something next to his heart but this isn't real, he must remember this, this is not real.

"Yes, of course." He sucks in an uncontrolled breath, then another. Fuck, there is meant to be a rhythm to this, establish it and move the fuck on. "I have a certain level of," he breaks off, breathe, exist, act fucking human, "experience with this level of, of -"

And he halts, grimacing. This is not real, it hasn't happened again, his rational mind can accept this but it's too hampered by irrational thought. "It's not real."

[wildmage_daine]

"Me, too," Daine says solemnly, a simple statement of fact. "I've been caged, too. But we're both out, now, and it's not happening again." Also true. They haven't been bothered, yet, but if any of his captors show up looking for trouble, she'll make certain they find plenty of it.

For the moment, though, his breathing is the only thing she's going to worry about. "I'm going to count to four while you breathe in - slowly - okay? Then you'll hold it for four seconds, and then breathe out for four. I'll just keep counting for you." If this were meditation, she'd advise him to quiet his mind, but that would be asking far too much right now, she suspects. "Here we go. In, two, three, four... hold, two, three, four... out, two, three, four…" She repeats it like a mantra, using her own steady heartbeat as a guide.

[lottawork]

He takes each word as it comes, eyes shut and hands shaking. Right. Yes. Absolutely. He is breathing, a joint effort of lungs and shoulders and breath. There's nothing coming for him if he doesn't want it. There's nothing here. He exists in a vacuum. He is sane. He is rational. He is sane and he is rational, and he's not about devolve into mindless panic over a scenario that has already happened and does not empirically exist.

Rush is still trembling when he finally recovers enough of his muscular functionality to shift away from the contact but even if he sways, he stands, and his respiration is perfectly non-erratic and he is the very fucking pinnacle of calm. He is fine.

"I'm fine," he says, though the effect is somewhat damaged by the spasmodic jerk of his head as he opens his eyes and is once again visually assaulted by the sickening backdrop of silvers and blues. "I simply - I need to get away. From this." Away from the glass, away from the intolerable blueish tint, away from the water.

[wildmage_daine]

Daine lets him pull away, drawing her hands back enough to give him some space while still keeping herself ready to catch him if he falters. He doesn't falter, though, only sways a little as his breathing steadies. Much better.

"Good idea," she agrees. Wherever they are, it's plenty creepy, and the mess they've made hasn't done much to improve it. She picks her way over said mess to check for any likely exits - or for approaching trouble. "Is one direction better than the other?" she asks him over her shoulder.

[lottawork]

Rush shakes his head; is this mental reconstruction fully accurate? Is there any way to tell? Fuck, he doesn't make frequent efforts to meticulously recreate ship layouts in his nightmares, does he? Or that would be precisely the fucked-up sort of thing his brain would do to him. Brilliant, counterproductive, and utter torture.

The room lacks a door but it does have an exit, simply a smooth, arched gap in the wall lined with empty cylinders of glass - or Rush fleetingly, fervently hopes are empty cylinders of glass, and he forces back the mild surge of nausea that thought invites. He moves through the room without any further glances back or to the side, all the while struggling to evaluate how one could torque this environment into something less agonizing, an association less liable to generate distress.

He exits the room and steps into the hallway, glancing down both avenues in one sharp sweep. Aching silence. Good. Silence is good. That means they're alone. This is preferred.

No. No, wait, no, it isn't. Rush's stomach lurches painfully, and he turns to Daine, voice ragged.

"We have to find one of them, we -" Has he completely lost his ability to articulate whatsoever? "The - aliens that took me, they - there's a way to get off the ship but they have it, we have to find one of them and, and -"

Oh, god. The words are rough and their cadence is dangerously verging on halting, and one hand welds itself to the side of Rush's head. He has to do this. It's what he did. Oh god.

[wildmage_daine]

Daine follows him out into the hall, making her own check for unwanted company. She doesn't see anything, and is considering reshaping her ears for better listening when Rush starts talking. Then she looks up at him in alarm, though the alarm is less to do with the thought of… what, killing a dream alien?… and more a response to his own mounting distress.

Well, if she can take this unpleasant task off of his plate, she'd be more than happy to. None of it's real, and even if it was, they're the sort of aliens who keep folk in awful cages. "All right," she says, as if hunting down an alien for vague but probably messy purposes is a perfectly normal activity, and how kind of him to invite her along. "Tell me about them. How big are they? How strong? Are they armed?"

[lottawork]

Yes. Excellent. This is preferred. They can look at this objectively and determine their best method of escape, this is entirely possible and will in no way be influenced by previous experience.

This is conclusive. This is axiom. This is rational.

"Tall," he says, voice infuriatingly faint, and he redoubles his efforts to speak levelly. "Very tall. But weak. Unarmed, if we take them by surprise. They -" And he must stop talking to accommodate the thickening of dread in his chest, but he must continue speaking and he must be comprehensible. Speak and enunciate and delineate and rationalize like a normal fucking human being. Be human.

He continues.

"They have a pronounced telepathic advantage." Rush does not even partially succeed in making his voice deceptively even, it wavers and he cringes and his hands clench and unclench and he is not thinking of what it was to have his mind carelessly knifed into in a multi-pronged neural siege until he lost all conception of what he was. "That's their weapon. They are capable of - inflicting severe," breathe, breathe, you are human and you are away and you are dreaming and you are alive, "incredibly severe mental torture."

Fuck. And now he can hear them, as if summoned by the acute spike in blazing, unbearable panic.

He can hear the soft padding of feet, thickets of insectlike appendages moving in whispered, menacing unison down one hall, soon to turn the corner and see them. Their voices are shrilling and dragging and utterly unintelligible, and any pretense of calm or rationality immediately dissolves as they draw closer, rounding the corner, Rush scrambles back and backs himself into the wall and slides down it and his hands grip at the sides of his head, no no no no, they're coming they're coming they're coming they're coming, he's going to go back in there to have his brain torn open and he'll have never escaped, he's doomed them both, fuck, no, no, no, the small herd of the slender blue things have turned the corner and have begun hissing their aggression and displeasure, and Rush can only huddle back in absolute terror and flinch away from each sound as though struck, paralyzed.

tw: violence, gore, pursuit by a bear

[wildmage_daine]

As Rush speaks, her expression shifts from determination to deepening disgust. So that's how they operate - they're too weak to fight proper, so they get in your head and mess you up from the inside out. They cheat, like cowards. No wonder Rush has been so edgy this whole time.

Then she hears them coming, and disgust is replaced with steely focus. Take them by surprise, he said. She can do that. She'll surprise them all to pieces.

"Wait here," she says, her own voice sounding a little too distant, a little too calm. "I'll take care of this."

Her first few steps toward the oncoming gaggle of monsters are human. She takes them in, all skinny limbs and bony, elongated torsos and bulbous heads, like something dredged up from the deepest ocean. Useless in a physical fight, which is exactly what she's bringing to them. Let's see how they like having their weaknesses exploited.

She sucks in a breath, then blooms into bear shape, falling forward onto all fours with a crash and a huff. Her mind closes with the finality of a slammed door. It would cut off the People, if any were here, maybe it'll be good enough for them, too.

There's a notable change in the pitch of their chattering, and two of the aliens at the front of the pack seem to falter. But it's too little, too late: she's on them now, and she surges up onto her hind legs and deals the closest one a savage blow right to its oversized skull. There's a sick thwok! as she sends it reeling into the wall - it's like fighting a gods-curst sponge cake - and she snarls in contempt before rounding on the next one.

And the next one. And the next one.

Her white fur is a mess with whatever passes for their blood. It smells foul, but at least it's not burning her like some immortals' would - a fact she appreciates, from a distance. Awful as they look, they're fair easy to kill, so much so that she'd probably feel guilty if they were real. They're not real. But when one tries to flee, she thinks it might be real enough to call for reinforcements, she lumbers after it, knocking it to the ground and slamming her forepaws through a spine that is far more brittle than sea ice.

That's the last of them, then. The only sound she can hear is her own ragged breathing. Good. Good.

Daine's human again by the time she returns to Rush's huddled form. Her arms are caked with gore to the elbow. Some things stay no matter what shape she takes. She looks down at Rush for a moment, then drops into a crouch.

"Okay," she says quietly. "It's okay. We can get what we need, now."

[lottawork]

It's an nauseatingly disorienting, terrifying collection of sounds that come churning out from the carnage, and Rush is defenseless in all ways except to retreat from it and draw deep into himself, hunched against the wall in an absurd impression of a child convincing himself that if he cannot see the monsters then they must not exist. He glimpses a shifting of mass that simply can't be correct, when did a bear enter this equation, but the cacophony of sickening crunches and eerily-pitched shrieks muffles him into petrified, stricken silence, pressed against the curve of the wall, made helpless by his own overpowering dismay.

This is not, bluntly speaking, what Rush would consider one of his finest moments, regardless of its debatable reality.

The corridor plunges into silence, save for the wet sounds of bodies settling and faint rustle of approaching movement. Rush's return to full awareness sends a brief thrill of panic through him when he opens his eyes to the splashes of vibrant blue, faintly, sinisterly phosphorescent and streaked across walls, over the floors, virtually decorating the place, and, most worryingly, sprayed over Daine as she crouches in front of him, apparently human again.

Rush swallows, a painful, jagged reflex that does nothing to halt his incessant shivering.

"You," he rasps, mingled fear and incredulity, "you killed them?" And he must force himself to continue, voice faltering, "...all of them?"

[wildmage_daine]

"All of them," she confirms with a reassuring nod. Then it occurs to her that maybe she wasn't supposed to, that maybe they needed to take one alive. Rush had never said for certain what they needed to do once they found one. She had just assumed. Odd's bobs, if it turns out she needed to take one prisoner or something, she's going to feel foolish.

"Is… was that right?" she asks, watching him uncertainly. "Should I have left one alive?" She supposes she could find another, but if this is the effect they have on Rush, she'd much rather not.

[lottawork]

"It - no, it wouldn't have mattered." Not with his breathing so fucking irregular and not with how inordinately impossible it has become to simply keep his eyes open, he wouldn't be capable of doing anything to any of them. He shakes his head breathlessly, tries to limit his awareness purely to Daine, and not the chaotic mess of blue in the hall.

"Just tell me how to change this." It sounds disturbingly like a plea, but shrunk away as he is, cornered as he is, Rush has extremely little control over how his vocal cords decide to pitch anything. "Please."

[wildmage_daine]

"Okay," Daine says, as if she has any idea what she's doing. But one of them needs to keep their head, and it seems that's falling to her. Fair enough. This isn't her nightmare. So she sits on the floor, cross-legged, and rests her unpleasantly sticky hands in her lap. "Close your eyes, and steady your breathing - four counts, remember?" She counts off a few times, watching him closely, and… wait.

She remembers him.

"… You were in the TARDIS," she says, straightening in surprise. "At the party. I saw you there." He'd been off in a corner looking grumpy, as she recalls - she'd looked at him, read the obvious 'do not approach' in his posture, and let him be.

They both know the TARDIS. They both know what she looks like, and that she's alien but good, the very opposite of this horrible place. If he can focus on her, maybe he can change their surroundings to something more familiar to both of them.

"Why don't we go back to the TARDIS?" she suggests, as if it's as straightforward as a trip to the market. "She's a much nicer ship than this one."

[lottawork]

Breathing, right. Breathing, yes. This is, once again, perfectly normal a suggestion. He remembers that. That's attainable. This is absolutely possible even given this dream's parameters, and even given the ungodly carnage he's just played witness to, that Daine initiated, but Rush fucking masters it, he's the one whose head has gone into fucking overdrive and he must be the one to contain it, naturally, that is only fair and understandable and logical.

"I -" He opens his eyes, respiration somewhat regularized, somewhat, and narrows his eyes at her oddly. "I was, yes." Though he doesn't remember her. He doesn't remember many names or faces, primarily engaged as he was in his work. But he remembers the TARDIS. Yes. The TARDIS is - entirely preferable to this intolerable setting. The TARDIS is preferable to most settings.

"Yes," says Rush, perfectly level and fine and normal and logical and not psychologically traumatized, not remembering anything other than the structure of the TARDIS and what it looked like from the outside compared to its elegantly constructed interior, and even as he frowns and forces all his tenuous concentration onto that remembered point in space, it's still a mild jolt to his faltering systems to turn and look carefully down the hall, the other hall, the one not liberally decorated by the remains of his captors, and to see the homogenous silver-blue lined walls narrowed to fit around the simple rectangular blue door at the end of it, as if the ship had always been built to house that very specific door with its cleanly cut edges and even line of POLICE BOX PUBLIC CALL across the top.

"Thank fuck." Rush levers himself up, again, with the wall as his support, again, and moves briskly to the door that swings inward at his touch, as if able to sense how unbearable this dream environment has become for him, has always been for him, and enters. It is not a flawless recreation, likely - it is a mental reconstruction performed by a damaged and terrified mind, and the central control room with its quietly bobbing rotor appears to be the only room he is currently able to give them access to. But it isn't blue, it's safe, it's away, and he exhales his relief.

[wildmage_daine]

Daine grins when that familiar blue door appears down the hall. She hadn't been certain it would actually work, that it could be as simple as she'd made it sound, but there it is. She gets to her feet and follows him through the door, breathing out a sigh of relief at the warm glow of the console room.

"Much better," she says approvingly, pulling the door shut behind her. She's moderately surprised to look down and see that her hands are clean - that her whole body is devoid of the mess she'd been covered in a few moments ago - but it seems right that she not carry any signs of the previous unpleasantness with her in here. "You're good at this," she adds, genuinely impressed. She's never made so profound a change to a dreamscape before - not that she can recall, anyway.

[lottawork]

"Am I?" Rush asks distractedly, bracing both arms against the console, finally allowing the stiff lines of tension in his shoulders and arms to fall away. He is, however much this can be said, safe here, relatively. Safe. And alive. He gives his own body a mystified look - at some point after stepping over his imaginary TARDIS's threshold, he apparently dried off and is now a quite normal body temperature. Even the uncontrollable tremors in his hands have begun to still, now that he is away.

"Interesting." He steps back and evaluates his mental handiwork, alarmed by the relative accuracy of the room's layout, then shoots a vaguely suspicious look at Daine. "I have - this has not historically been - " Rush hooks one hand over the back of one shoulder and makes a frustrated grunt in the back of his throat. Inarticulate. Inexcusable. "I've never been capable of this before." Torquing his nightmares into something even slightly more bearable, however, is a turning out to be a useful skill.

[wildmage_daine]

"Sometimes the rift makes it easier, I think," she says, running her hand along one of the railings. It feels just as it ought to, though given it's her hand doing the feeling, she's not sure if it's due to his memories or hers. Not that it matters, really. "I'm good at recognizing dreams - I can usually tell right away when I'm in one - but that might just be practice."

She leans back against the railing and looks up at the central rotor, half an eye on Rush. He already looks better, more at ease, and she allows herself to relax a little. If things get terrible again, she'll deal with it, but she's happy to enjoy this spell for as long as it lasts.

"I've been here a while," she adds by way of explanation.

[lottawork]

This would be the first fucking time the Rift has done him any sort of favor, and Rush glares skyward by way of silent condemnation. What an infuriating, mercurial little fuck of an anomaly. He'd dissect its workings if it he could, but all but the most elementary understanding of what it is has masterfully evaded him.

He leans away from the console, examining its disordered spread of buttons and levers for a moment before looking wearily at Daine.

"I haven't," he says with an equivocal lift of one shoulder. "Weeks, most likely." The passage of time is somewhat beyond the scope of his interest, and thus he has had no reason to trace it. "How long is 'a while' by your standards?"