there's a tangled thread inside this head with nothing on the other end [closed]

[lottawork]

The sharp sting of the sea-smelling air and the pale blaze of tall, stately buildings are all tied to an inextricable specter of aching, deadened grief. Compared to the remainder of him, however, that which is flooded in ice and splintering exhaustion and the twisting contracture of agonized muscle, it is utter relief. He has torn his mind away to skid into a set of memories apart - an attempt at some blissful temporary landscape of subconscious manufacture, shrouded in stifling heat and glittering, crisply defined white buildings and disorganized stacks of yet-to-be-graded exams and a worn desk surface dense with the academic disarray of messily-scrawled papers and too many textbooks.

The point at which rational paranoia approaches irrationality is too subjective, too skewed by recent experience, and intuiting the correct order has become a crushing, pressing torture of navigating the wreckage left to rot in his own head. He is aware and he is present, but -

But he knows what will happen when he wakes. What is waiting for him.

The same that has been waiting for him for days. Assuming it has been days.

Temporal sequencing was never, in the light of humor and cruelty and irony - his forte.

He looks out beyond the scope of his office, into the hall that should maintain the uniform white interior but instead cuts cleanly to a corridor, smooth and faintly oxidized gray lit in a haze of blues and yellows. He exits his office and steps almost directly into the vast, overarching space of Destiny’s gateroom, rippled light thrown from the shimmering pale blue of the open gate.

The old walkways of academia, threaded seamlessly and incomprehensibly throughout the Ancient ship that’s long since been lost.

An imperfect interface for an imperfect state of mind.

He is shivering from the abrupt temperature shift, stepping from the too-warm, too-heated offices of a college campus to the overwhelming coolness of a ship's interior.

He closes his eyes.

He prefers this. He does. It will be brief, it will be transient, it will be - unbearably disorganized, this fracturing, easily shattered hell of two contexts interleaved on a single plane. The plane that exists within his head, or whatever state of disrepair it has been left in. He won't be able to hold onto it once he wakes. Once they make him wake.

He'll lose it all again, because he won't be able to hold onto it. He won't be able to hold onto anything.

It's better that way.

Comments

[etherthief]

It only takes a bit of wandering to determine that this cannot be real, the interlocking spaces that shouldn't, don't fit together, all of it unfamiliar, no memory of how she came to be here. This is a dream, but it isn't her dream. None of this is familiar.

She's alone, everything sharply, disturbingly silent as she walks slowly through the hallways jammed together like a frustrated attempt at a puzzle or a collage. It's all super fucking creepy but it feels like she's here for a reason, and that doesn't necessarily make it better, but it does push her forward.

It's easy enough to hear a second set of echoed footsteps, standing out against her own, and she halts quickly. She puts her back against the wall, staring down the hall, trying to pick out where it's coming from. Now that she listens closer it's not footsteps, really, it's... clicking. More legs than two. An animal?

Then it rounds the corner, and she freezes.

It is a wolf.

It is a wolf and it is just here, chilling, and now looking at her.

What does one do with wolves? Who the fuck dreams about this shit?

"Hhhi," she says, her voice coming out thinner and breathier than usual.