We Are Awakened With The Axe [Open to All]

[applesaucemod]

The city has been abandoned.

Its infrastructure has been slowly deteriorating for quite some time, now. Traffic has long since ground to a permanent halt, taxis and trucks rusting by the curbs or abandoned mid-intersection. Most of the ground-floor windows have been shattered. Electricity is spotty, if it can be found at all. The eerie silence is broken only by the wind, the calls of crows, or the gentle collapse of some structure or other. And, of course, the occasional screams.

The city has been abandoned, but it is not empty.

What caused the various outbreaks hardly matters. Viral infection, fungal infection, some new or ancient bacterium suddenly released into the general populace - who knows? What does matter is that the city has become home to thousands if zombies, some slow, some fast, some mindless, some retaining a savage kind of intelligence. And they are all so, so hungry.

There are weapons to be found or improvised, and places to hide if you're lucky enough to come across someplace well-fortified and otherwise empty. Others have clearly had the same idea, leaving hastily constructed barricades in some places. You might even take those as a blessing, if the conspicuous absence of the original builders doesn't bother you. They're probably living on a nice farm somewhere.

One thing is certain: if you don't want to succumb to whatever plagues have ravaged this place, you will have to fight for your survival.

[OOC: usual dream party rules apply; all are welcome to participate, and characters can remember or forget at the players' discretion. Also, usual zombie rules apply: if you get bitten, you'll be turned into the sort of zombie that bit you. Whether your characters deal with comically dim shamblers or the terrifying sprinty variety is up to you.

Finally, let's just go ahead and say tw: violence and gore for the post as a whole, because it's gonna get messy, folks.]

Comments

[johnny_truant]

"Nah." Johnny shakes his head. "Got all the exits covered here. Long as ammo lasts we're safe where we are. There's nowhere to go out there, just more of them and nowhere to hide."

Does Daniel not realize this is a dream? Odds are good, especially considering the last one, where it seemed like almost no one knew who they were, not to mention how Daniel doesn't seem to remember being a fucking ghost.

"We'll wake up sooner or later," he says tentatively. "Hopefully not by getting eaten."

[peacefulexplorer]

"Wake up," he repeats slowly. "You mean like - "

Like a dream.

Daniel stares at his hands and pulls the fingers into fists, testing the motion with the repeated clenching and unclenching of fingers. He runs a hand over the interior of their makeshift shelter. Nothing about the texture of the air or the cement or the environment hints at anything that feels remotely oneiric.

"We're dreaming?" he says, uncertainty creeping into his voice. "But why can't I - "

A gnawing sensation of wrongness itches the back of his skull. Like some vital part of him has been inexplicably lost or amputated, something he can't conceptualize.

It feels obvious that he should remember, but he can't.

[johnny_truant]

"Hey." Johnny watches him in growing concern. "It's okay, man. You, uh... you've been having kind of a weird existence lately."

How much should he share? He doesn't think this dream is set up to accommodate a whole breakdown.

"It's gonna be okay," he says. "It'll end. Even if it has to end badly. They all end."

Not very comforting, he knows. But at this point it's about all he can offer.

[peacefulexplorer]

"Oh," says Daniel weakly. "Great. Good. That's great, I mean. That's a good thing. The waking up, not the death. The strictly hypothetical - death."

He puts his head in his hands then pulls it back out again. His nerves are jittering with something sourceless, something he can't put a name to, and he has to stand again and pace in an effort to expend some small amount of his rapidly-increasing pool of nervous energy.

"Weird existence," he repeats skeptically. Is Johnny being purposefully cryptic? Would he know it if he wasn't? Maybe that's a good thing. Daniel doesn't - yep, no, if it's relevant, he probably should know.

Unless he doesn't.

"Do I want to know?" he asks the ceiling.

[johnny_truant]

Johnny looks back down, occupying himself by reloading the gun with his dwindling ammo supply, shrugging ruthlessly.

"Probably not," he says. "That is it probably wouldn't really, uh, benefit you to know right now."

He's doing a great fucking job of this isn't he. This isn't exactly his forte. Apparently that's killing zombies. It scares him a little, how easily he just fell into place here, when even the most pleasant dreams are usually relentless shitshows for him. He can't afford to analyze it.

[peacefulexplorer]

"Okay," says Daniel, the strain of keeping his voice light and not shattering under the pressure of an incipient breakdown probably extremely audible.

He closes his eyes and leans against the wall, head back.

"All right."

The jangling feeling that tangibility might slip from his fingers without warning is inescapable. He braces his palms against the building's reassuring solidity, as if that would keep the fabric of unreality from being ripped from him.

"I'm dead, aren't I?" he says, eyes reopening to regard the ceiling with a dull lack of surprise. "That figures. It was only a matter of time."

[johnny_truant]

Johnny blows air through his teeth and rolls his head back, looking at the ceiling before he looks at Daniel.

"Yeah," he says. "Kind of. You died, like, in front of me. In my apartment. You don't remember that?"

Well, apparently they're getting into it after all. Not like they have much else to talk about. No marshmallows to roast.

[peacefulexplorer]

"Uhhh." Should he? He probably should. "No?"

Daniel coughs and looks away, at the wall, at the ceiling, and finally back to Johnny.

"You, um." He fiddles with a fraying thread of his BDUs, eyes downcast. "You don't - have to talk about it. I mean, I'd get it. I wouldn't wanna talk about it either. Er - you know."

Except he would. Confrontation always was one of his less elegant specialties.

Daniel swallows hard, folding his arms and trying not to feel like he's throwing up some kind of kinesic defense.

[johnny_truant]

Johnny grunts noncommittally. He has no desire to get back into this shit, but he's not quite capable of just dropping it, he thinks. "Well, I mean, you're not still dead," he says. "You ascended or whatever. This is the first I've seen you, like... human... in a while."

He glances back over, trying to get a read on how Daniel is taking this. He doesn't know what else to say, what to ask. Does this mean Daniel's going to be back to normal when he wakes up? Is this just happening in a weird vacuum?

Before he can say anything else something catches his eye to his left and he turns sharply, lifting the gun. He fires off a shot before even fucking checking to see if it was a zombie or not, and feels an immediate wave of nausea. God, he could have done that to Daniel, so easily. Fuck.

He stands up quickly, shakily, and peers out the gap in the wall. The thing twitching and dying on the floor is not human, or not anymore. Well that's a fucking relief. He double-taps coldly and pulls back against the wall, staying on his feet for now. Adrenaline too jacked to sit.

[peacefulexplorer]

Ascended? Did he explain this to him in some kind of parallel situation? Or - waking situation? Daniel stares at Johnny with warring confusion and alarm until Johnny jerks around and spontaneously opens fire.

"That wasn't - " The protest dies in his throat when Daniel follows the suit, craning his neck to glimpse the dying, rasping thing on the ground through the split in the wall.

Daniel sits back, his throat dry.

"How did you know?" he asks, slow and wary.

[johnny_truant]

"Um..." What, is that a secret? "You... told me? Well, actually some other fucker told me. But I wasn't sure I could trust him until you... showed up. In my kitchen."

Daniel really doesn't remember any of this.

Did the Rift just give him a pre-death Daniel to play with? How very fucking nice of it.

"Sorry," he blurts awkwardly, rubbing a hand against his temple, trying to stave off the brimming headache. "I know this is fucking weird."

[peacefulexplorer]

"I mean - " He gestures vaguely at the dead - hopefully dead, please let it be dead, fully and truly and completely dead and unaware - thing outside. "How did you know that was - that it wasn't - "

For a linguist, he's having an unusually difficult time verbalizing.

[johnny_truant]

"Oh." Oh right, that. Daniel didn't miss how he just turned without - right.

"Uh." Johnny looks down, feeling a numb prickle of dread spread over him. He's hesitated too long now, he can't make something up, and he doesn't want to lie to Daniel anyway.

He also doesn't want Daniel to think he's a monster.

But he is, isn't he? Maybe it's time people saw him for that.

"I didn't," he says.

[peacefulexplorer]

Oh.

Okay.

It's not so unspeakable. Jack would've done the same thing, probably. Sam. Teal'c. Any of them.

Probably.

"Uh-huh," he says, looking at the ground, ignoring the percolation of restive apprehension throughout his system. "I guess, ah - good guess."

He can't fault him for that. He can't fault him for having a working instinct for self-preservation, even if Daniel would rather risk potential death himself than shoot something that might be aware, that might not be an enemy, that might be capable of understanding him.

He can't fault him for that.

In retrospect, the objective for most of these things is pretty obvious. They're hungry. They want to eat, and they want to kill. And neither he nor Johnny wants to end up on the menu.

That's perfectly reasonable.

[johnny_truant]

"It's a dream, okay?" says Johnny, his tone taking on a defensive, ruthless edge, because even when he knows he's a monster he can't stop fighting against that impression, pretending he's totally fucking justified in every fucked up thing he does because mommy left or whatever. "None of this matters. They aren't real things, and if it was a dreamer, well, I would have given them a quick exit."

Yeah. That makes it okay.

It absolutely doesn't say anything about you. Where your fucking priorities really lie.

Cause it's not like a normal dream where you can just hide behind 'my subconscious did it'.

This is you, Johnny.

[peacefulexplorer]

"Yeah." Daniel's hands skim his own elbows, as if trying to reaffirm the reality of his own clothing and skin. "Yeah, no. I know that. Rationally, I know that."

Does he? He looks at Johnny and hates the prickle of unease that shivers over him. It's Johnny. He knows Johnny. He acted in self-defense. It was justified.

Wasn't this how they met, anyhow?

It's all getting increasingly difficult to temporally sequence.

"This place, um." He shuts his eyes and tries to think along the lines of tactics, would this be a typical mission. Cut off from the 'gate, probably. Jaffa? Almost definitely. That's all those things outside are. Just - regular enemies. "It's not really that defensible. You know? You think maybe we should get to higher ground?"

He can't tell if the note in his voice is pleading or inquiring.

[johnny_truant]

"This is about as high as I could get," mutters Johnny. "This building is pretty fuckin hollowed out. We'd have to get to another one. There's more of them out there." He glances toward a broken window, not wanting to get too close to it. "There's a fire escape out there. When I run out of bullets, that's where I'm going."

It's stupid but it's the plan he's got.

This will all come down on his head sooner or later, one way or another. No matter where he's sitting. He's not gonna walk into it faster. Maybe Daniel doesn't like that but that's where he is.

[peacefulexplorer]

Not if. When. Daniel tries and fails to suppress a mild chill. There is sort of a grim inevitability to this, to the city overtaken by people made mindless by a horrific, monstrous hunger beyond their control.

"I mean it - might be a bad idea," he begins tentatively, hating that he's suggesting this, hating that he even has to ask this, hating that this is what he's come down to. "But couldn't you - warp the building? Close it up, or - ?" He makes a helpless, circular gesture whose purpose he isn't really certain of.

"Or - that would be bad." The question resolves like a pronouncement of fact, pitched low and definitive. Johnny never seems to want to use the power he's demonstrated he possesses, and for good reason, even if most of the evidence is anecdotal from Daniel's perspective.

His shoulders tense with self-directed distaste as he immediately wishes he hadn't said anything.

[johnny_truant]

Johnny's constant, fidgeting motions come to an abrupt halt when Daniel starts on that line of thinking, and though part of it certainly is the reaction Daniel seems to be expecting, another part is bewilderment that he hadn't even considered that.

He actually fucking forgot.

For a second he felt normal, or at least as normal as he used to be, and he's dreaming himself in the midst of a goddamn zombie apocalypse.

He's about to say something about how that might only be more dangerous, but you know what, fuck it.

"You're right," he says simply, drops the gun, presses his hand to the wall, and changes everything.

[peacefulexplorer]

He expected at least some kind of token protest, maybe the reminder that Johnny's power has, as confirmed by multiple parties, nearly killed someone and is probably capable of much worse.

He doesn't expect Johnny to go along with it; even less does he expect the shifting of the walls and floor and ceiling, seamless and disturbingly natural compared to the last time he witnessed something like this.

He has to close his eyes against the changes to the architecture that defy convention, that defy physics, and hates that he actively encouraged the use of something Johnny so clearly hates.

Hated?

Does he still?

"How, um," he says, fighting to keep his voice level in the face of something he doesn't want to see. "How long before something - happens?"

[johnny_truant]

Johnny almost laughs. He wants to, and it's an unkind impulse. He's not sure where all this bitter, cruel nihilism is coming from, and it's not something he's going to explore right now. Instead he just shrugs, looking dully at the wall.

"Hell if I know," he says. "It doesn't work on a system. There's no rules it follows. I'm not its fucking keeper."

It keeps me.

"Might be nothing happens," he says drolly. "Have a little faith."

[peacefulexplorer]

"That's not what you said before," he mutters, eyeing the smooth evenness of the walls warily.

Maybe he shouldn't have suggested it at all.

That probably would have been wiser.

Less liable to get them both killed.

Only - that isn't a problem for Daniel so much these days, is it? Has it ever been? What kind of right does he have to dredge up whatever issues Johnny might have with his power after the fact?

He brushes fingertips against the walls, the seamless close that rippled shut, sealing them from their exposed position relative to the elements and the mindless, hungering things prowling the city. It feels wrong. Something not so much in the building or the walls themselves but - deeper?

Daniel shivers and withdraws his hand.

"Always kind of a gamble," he hazards. "I guess that would make sense."

[johnny_truant]

"Why, what'd I say before?" he asks, and it's a genuine question though he voices it like a taunt. He feels irrationally annoyed by Daniel's insistence on remaining good-natured, even in the face of utter disaster, even when he obviously has an issue with every decision Johnny's made so far, as well he fucking should. See, this is what happens when you put your faith in Johnny Truant as a person. Are you happy with that choice, Daniel?

He stretches his legs out, pretending nonchalance.

"Oh yeah," he says coldly, frowning at the floor. "It's a real fun game."

[peacefulexplorer]

"That it nearly killed someone," he says, stretching the words out cautiously. How does one make a pronouncement of concern sound like anything but the criticism he doesn't want it to be? "That it's part of, uh, a nightmare? Your nightmare?"

His voice falters. It's clear he's trespassing on something deeply personal, and Johnny's attitude of frosty neutrality isn't doing much to put him at ease.

Maybe he shouldn't be here.

That's practically his talent. Opening doors he shouldn't. Entering places he doesn't belong.

It's different when it's a person.

"I shouldn't have - " His voice falters. "I shouldn't have asked this of you. I'm sorry."

The idea that something like that could fix anything is, as always, bleakly absurd. Empty apologies. Self-contradictory and self-flagellating and utterly, utterly pointless.

[johnny_truant]

"Not someone," he says viciously. "Seth. I gave it to Seth because I was selfish and I wanted to get rid of it and it almost killed him, because it's mine and no one else can shoulder it."

He breaks himself off and looks at the wall, staring hard and with such intensity as if he were physically forcing himself not to look at Daniel.

"Don't apologize," he mutters. "I didn't have to do it." He pulls his knees up to his chest and folds his arms over them for a place to rest his head. "It was a smart move. Even if it does kill us, it'll probably be quicker than getting eaten."

It's so easy to just say shit like that now.