Ark Awaits [open to multiple]

[deadeyedchild]

He is awake.

He doesn't have a body, and he remembers dying - again - he remembers slipping out, Tim unable to keep him there in spite of his hardened insistence that he wasn't going to let it happen, he remembers all of that, but he can't account for himself now. All he knows is he's awake.

Jay clings to that awareness as hard as he can. He doesn't know where he is, if it's a where at all, if he's alive or if this is just the suspension of afterlife, but he's still conscious, he's still him. Formless and adrift in the void. No arms to reach, no hands to grasp, but he tries, tries to stretch out fingers and hold onto something, even if it's just the continued knowledge of self, of me, Jay, I am Jay Merrick, and no one is going to miss me.

Even as an abstraction he can't escape his bent toward bleak self-deprecation.

There's something pulling at him - or maybe he's the one pulling, hauling himself into a defined space, someone else's space, still abstract, but not formless. He knows this sensation. A dream. He's dreaming. Or someone else is dreaming. He's just a stowaway.

Easier to hold a shape in a dream, though, and it doesn't take long before the memory of a body fills in the gaps, and there he is again, eyes that see, senses more or less intact - looking down at his arms, his hands, his legs and feet. Hand over his face and through his hair. All here. One piece.

He looks up, focus drawn naturally to the dreamer.


[Jay is free-falling through the dreaming, and if you want, he can get scooped up into your dream! The 21st is the current IG date at the time of post, but feel free to date your entry later as that changes. Will add a closing date at some point, when I have that figured out.]

Comments

September 21st

[peacefulexplorer]

Daniel's not sure if he's dreaming or hallucinating, categorically, because in his experience neither have been strictly applicable to his newfound state of being. Probably not dreaming. Definitely not hallucinating. He's making his own way, and that dovetails rather neatly into the kind of selfsame, thoughtlessly independent, recklessly idealistic, outrageously introspective narrative he's always assumed he's filled, or perhaps even established for himself.

Do abstractions exist within other abstractions? He's certain they do in some sense. The Dreaming isn't really a space he can grasp at the best of times and it never has been; one metaphysical construct meeting another seems to be something of a recipe for imminent ontological disaster. He's always been careful about where he places himself - except, no, that's a lie, because he's never been careful at all. Floating at the edges of every existence like something eidolic and unmoored is a precarious space to occupy. But so is being able to build a room that looks exactly like the one he's never physically been in: small and octagonal and stretching upward in its seeming infiniteness, outstretched to catch the thing coming at him.

Yeah let's just go with the 21st

[andhiswife]

It actually takes Greta a few moments to place him, which is just... inexcusable. There's a beat where she just stares at the lad, mulling him over as if trying to feel out an object in the dark, her mind spitting out vague tidbits like sad and motherless and starts with a J, doesn't it? before she belatedly puts it together.

Jack. Obviously. She'll forget her own head, next.

Blame it on the fact that she's tired, or that he's gone through a growth spurt these past few months - there's a joke to be made about beanstalks; she'll leave that to her husband - but as she spots him slouching between two stalls, it strikes her afresh how different he looks to when she first met him in the Woods. They're all growing up, she supposes. Including her own son, old enough now to run about and get into mischief and hang off her arm with a bored, "Muuuu-um! Are we done yet?"

She checks her basket one more time, because if she's having a hard time placing Jack, of all people, goodness knows whether she's managed to remember all her shopping. But everything seems to be in order, so she extricates her arm from her son's grip and gives the boy an encouraging nudge. "Yes, yes. Go fetch your brother."

"Jack!" The boy tears across the street, stumbling over a loose cobblestone as he goes, but with enough forward momentum to plow into Jack rather than fall to the ground. He wraps his arms around the older boy's leg and grins up at him. "We get to go home."

[ofschrodinger]

Gotcha! The kitten hardly waits until the little dreamer fully forms before it's already pouncing on him. There's no reason to tear him apart when it already did that so perfectly such a short time ago, but it relishes the way it can dig its claws into the memories of memories of wounds here where it can be big. It can be anything in dreams, but more importantly, it can hide away from the others, hide him away where they can't see it playing with him and take him away. In the box, in the box, in the box you go, it sing-songs tunelessly to itself. Concept of body. Concept of cat. Concept of a dark little box into which it deposits a concept of Jay, slinking in on top of him and shutting the lid behind them.