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]

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?"

[wildmage_daine]

She actually has to pause and make a mental count. At first, it was easy to keep track, each day, each week one of the few she presumed it would take for Numair or the Badger or her Da or someone to find her. But when no one showed up except for a much-older Aly who knew nothing of Daine's disappearance, the count changed. No one was going to come find her, it was just a matter of how long she would be stuck here until someone else figured out how to get her home.

She hasn't been so eager to keep careful track of those days.

"Eight months, just about," she answers, adding a half-hearted shrug, as if that'll make it less depressing. "I've known the TARDIS for seven of them."

[lottawork]

He takes that in with a noncommittal tilt of his head, hand sliding away from the back of his neck to loosely wrap around his opposite arm. The need to move and shift following that period of mental-physical stagnation has left him restive, and his nervous system still irritatingly on edge.

"She is," Rush says, lifting his gaze back to the central column, expression softening marginally, "truly fascinating."

He looks to the door and wonders if the space has shifted, or if he has shifted it, or if the environment is static and he's merely introduced a foreign element, but trepidation holds him away from opening the door and satisfying that faintly nagging curiosity.

[wildmage_daine]

He barely reacts to to her answer, neither sympathetic nor impressed, and she finds herself grateful for it. Now she won't have to pretend it's quite an achievement, or hold his hand over something that's happened to her. They can just talk about the TARDIS. That's safe enough; it's clear that Rush likes her.

"I take her flying, sometimes," she says with a wry smile, tapping the side of her head. "Up here, I mean. I'll take falcon shape and let her ride along in my mind. It's fun."

[lottawork]

"Is that so?" He mirrors her smile, relieved at the establishment of this topic, preferable as it is to dwelling over more recent circumstances. His tone slides into something fractionally more wary as he goes on, "and she is - capable of that level of extensive telepathic bonding?"

Naturally he knows the TARDIS would have some telepathic functions, to an extent, or an awareness of who interacts with her, but he has no grasp of how far those abilities reach. And the recently stirred memories of what has been done to his mind in the past has not made him overly eager to share that neuronal space with any being capable of doing so, regardless of its relative importance.

[wildmage_daine]

The question confuses her a little, because it seems obvious that the answer is 'yes.' But then she remembers the aliens she dispatched, and his curiosity makes a bit more sense. Oh, dear. Maybe she shouldn't've mentioned it. The TARDIS is different, though; Daine can't imagine her getting into someone's head just to hurt them.

She doesn't have to imagine the TARDIS just sliding into someone's mind without warning or notice, though. The ship did that to her almost as soon as meeting her. She definitely shouldn't mention that.

"I invited her to try it," she says instead. "It's something I'd done with the People - animals - before, and I figured it might work much the same way if she tried it with me. But she doesn't just poke around folks' minds without asking." Usually. Probably.

[lottawork]

That is to be anticipated, perhaps, but it's still inanely relieving to hear it said aloud. The TARDIS would not do something so invasive beyond what might be expected upon initial entry.

"Your own abilities," he begins with trepidation. It seems they have established some level of familiarity whose range he can't fully determine - what level of friendliness does freeing one from a dream reconstruction of a past trauma typically entail? - and inquiring as to the nature of these abilities may seem forward, or unacceptable in some way, but Daine has made those powers quite apparent in her rescue of him. "I assume they all connect to that particular - they are ecologically-based?" She's able to shift form and body mass, clearly, but her later statements would imply communication with animals in addition to being capable of taking various shapes.

[wildmage_daine]

At this point, there's little for her to be reserved about as far as her abilities are concerned. He's already seen the part that she tends not to share with those she's just met; everything else is rather mild in comparison.

"Wild magic," she says with an encouraging nod. "That's what it's called back home. It gives me a connection with animals, so I can take their shape and talk to them. I can heal them if they're sick or injured, too." Anticipating the next question, she adds, "None of it works with humans, though, or any of the aliens I've met who look human. But it works with the animals in Manhattan, so wild magic must stretch across more realms than just my own."

Thank all the listening gods for that. She'd've gone mad by now if none of the animals on the island responded to her. Like being a ghost, or something.

[lottawork]

Magic is a phrase that would have, some time ago ago, elicited a derisive snort and an explanation regarding methods of rationalizing what cannot be wholly conceptualized. However, a number of factors, spontaneously being launched into a non-corresponding year in a non-corresponding point in spacetime included, has somewhat forcibly expanded his mindset.

"Something of a constant," he notes, now tracing the line of his jaw thoughtfully with the knuckle of an index finger. "Physics is universally applicable regardless of placement in whichever brane, phase, dimension, what have you. Whatever properties your," it is a slight difficulty to actively discuss it and not sound exceptionally foolish, but Rush attempts it, "magic holds, perhaps it is a similar circumstance." And then, as a frowning addendum, "or possibly these properties are unique to you and, in this brane's context, you're something of a catalyst."

[wildmage_daine]

"I'm fair certain the animals had wild magic before I got here," she says, frowning thoughtfully into the middle distance. "But it's true that me being around changes 'em a bit. They tend to get more clever - clever the way humans are." It's not something she's especially pleased about, but it's not something she can seem to help, either. Especially in this case: it's hardly her fault she's confined to an island that falls entirely within her range.

"It's already happening to the ones who live in the park," she adds. "They're all a fair bit smarter than they ought to be." She tries for a smile. "On the bright side, if you ever need to find me, you can just ask one of the animals. They'd be able to reach me quick enough."

[lottawork]

Rush is having this vaguely surreal conversation about magic affecting animal intelligence with a teenager capable of altering mass and shape to mimic those of various animals, but as this conversation also happens to be taking place in a mental representation of a spacetime ship in a dream, surreality is perhaps a given.

"I'll keep that in mind," he notes, and he means it. Daine has proven to be - refreshingly competent throughout this disturbingly inconsistent experience. He would not mind encountering her in the waking world. That would, likely, be preferred for both of them.

"Though on that note -" The TARDIS doors receive another concerned glance, though when the look transfers to Daine it slides into a wry, rueful twist of the mouth. "Would you possibly have a means or method for waking up? I am not terribly fond," he grimaces, trying and failing to mask a flinch when the memories of the nightmare's beginning leak back, unbidden, "of dreams."