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

[lottawork]

The ship shudders from an invisible impact and another veil of sparks flares downward. Rush retreats, free hand pressing to the side of his head, unable to suppress the frustrated, tearing sound in the back of his throat. Any and all attempts to divert either of them have simply made them more determined to act otherwise.

There is one other tactic he could, potentially, attempt based on his knowledge of their interpersonal relations. It would approximate deception and it would approximate irrationality and it would not be keyed to the same logical thought progression he has been adhering to but - they would have no means for assessing the veracity of his statements.

"What about the angels," he rasps. "The TARDIS. They need warning. They need someone - who can get them out."

[etherthief]

"This is about you," says Iman curtly, looking at him again, now noting the changes to his arm, oh god, what have they done. Her expression twists slightly. "We get you out, we get you safe, then we warn the others. I haven't gone to the TARDIS and I won't, I know we can't risk endangering her. But she's powerful and she's protected herself this long. Angels too. You're human, Rush."

She knows he'll hate this but she can't be fucked to care right now. She reaches out and puts her hand on his good shoulder. "Look, we have the buffalo girl. She tore that place up so bad they're still talking about it and they never found her. After we get you out we'll figure a way to deal with what we know, figure out the next step, but this comes first and you're a dumb fucking shit for thinking otherwise."

She lets him go. The dream is shifting and fraying around them. He's probably starting to wake.

She looks at Daine. "You know Wilmot's?" she says. "We'll meet there tomorrow. Earliest you can."

[wildmage_daine]

Daine gives Rush a cursory, baffled glance, not understanding why he'd bring up the safety of those best able to protect themselves. If it's meant to put either of them off, it's not going to.

But there's no time to argue with him. The dream's about to come down around their ears. "Yes," she says, turning back to Iman as sparks rain down from the ceiling and raising her voice to be heard over the groans of the ship. "I'll see you there."

[lottawork]

He flinches, trembling under her grip - she could not have known what motion that emulated, the harsh digging of fingers beneath his collarbone but his muscles have locked and he cannot tear out of that grasp he cannot shatter the remembered sensation that initiated this that initiated all of this and she could not have known she could not have -

The mounting pressure behind his eyelids detonates. His back arches under buckling tension, head flung sharply back, teeth bared, before he adapts his trajectory and stumbles back instead, his shoulders hunched and his breathing heavy. His uninjured hand leaps to his face, to the hot trickle gathering on the ridge of his upper lip. It comes away slick and red.

Destiny echoes with an unnatural, shrieking tone.

"Epistaxis," he mutters shortly. "They’re waking me up."

He will need to alter his approach. This is absolute. This is unequivocal. This is a necessity. The prevention of future decoherence, of further failure on his part. He fixes Asadi with a stare haunted and torn, expression briefly, desperately contorting as he says quietly, "get out of the city."

It will not be sufficient. One side of his mouth twists into a pained half-smile, quietly meaningful, subtly mocking. "Please."

The ship rends itself apart in the snap into consciousness, the persistence of a single tone, the dark and disorientation of freezing concrete.