applesaucedream | Hello Darkness My Old Friend [Open to Multiple]

Current Music: January 27, 2013 (backdated)

Entry tags:

Hello Darkness My Old Friend [Open to Multiple]

The world is dark and there's a war in heaven. The blackness of the scene is deep, lit only by the graceful, inhuman figures of his brothers and sisters. They dance viciously, hands clasped around long silver blades, slashing as they turn and evade. They bleed light and die like a star going supernova. Gabriel stands trembling, watching. If it wasn't so horrible, it might be beautiful.

He's wearing the same vessel he has been wearing for so long now-

Briefly, the scene shifts. He's kneeling before this vessel, a hand cupping the slightly stubbled chin. He'll shave properly, when he takes it. The man smiles, nods. It looks so sincere.

Gabriel smiles back, in awe of him.

-except he can feel the weight of his wings, the power contained there, his own potential for destruction. Behind him, they sweep up at least twenty times his height, closed in and tight against each other, a gigantic extension of his own horrified posture. Next to any of the rest, he would look so small like he is now. Inconsequential. Still, they'll want him to join in, soon. Michael will come looking, or Lucifer. Enough will have died that he will be needed on one side or the other.

He wonders if this slaughter is really what God wanted, then chastises himself for thinking it. He should fight for heaven, for God. Another supernova lights up the black canvas. A triumphant shout echoes back to him along with a ghost of bright piercing pain. How can they deny the feeling that quakes through them with each death? Is he the only one?

He can't bring himself to take a single step forward. Instead, he drops to his knees and prays. The sounds of his prayers rend the air around him, harsh, beautiful, and useless. No one turns to him, and God isn't listening.

He searches for something, any feeling in the darkness that isn't this, isn't here. When he feels something, he pulls on it like a lifeline.

[[ooc: Gabriel has passed out following events that will be happening in this thread. He doesn't have control over his dreaming, and chances are he won't know he's dreaming most of the time, so expect horror, and expect him to take over the dream.]]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Gabriel nods, and carefully walks alongside her trying to focus on the subway entrance. Talking at the same time is almost too much, so he doesn't bother. It's not a long walk, but it feels like it takes forever because each step is agony. If only the cold would numb him enough to stop the pain, but somehow it doesn't touch it.

He has to retrace his steps twice as they go to retrieve them. Two long contour feathers are tucked away very carefully with the others. Soon, he thinks, he'll have to find another way of carrying them. There's only so much space in his pockets.

The entrance to the subway isn't much warmer than outside, but the wind dies down almost immediately and he nearly collapses right there. He turns to the girl, wondering again what she's doing here. She couldn't be here just for him, could she? Is she being punished as well?

"No use," he finally says, referring to his wings. "They won't heal."

Every time he turns around, his wings look dramatically worse, as if he's somehow managing to lose more feathers than he's shedding. She wonders if she should offer to carry some, but she doesn't know what sort of magic they might have. It might not be safe for her to touch them. She frowns at the thought, hoping it's not true; it'd make trying to patch him up a lot more difficult.

They step into the subway entrance, and Daine lets out a quiet sigh of relief as the wind eases. Soon they'll be warmer, too, and she has to resist the urge to haul Gabriel down to the door. It's not an option, given how much trouble he seems to be having just staying on his feet. She considers slinging his arm over her shoulders so she can take a bit more of his weight, but she suspects that would only pain him more, especially if she jostled his wings.

His unfixable wings. She frowns at him as they slowly head down the stairs. "What's wrong with them?"

The door to the base swings open when she knocks, and her frown deepens. There ought to be a guard. Where's Phil? She steps into the corridor, and while it never has been much to look at, it looks even worse than normal - as if no one's been through it in ages. This isn't right.

The stairs down are difficult, but with her help he manages them without losing anymore feathers. He follows her in, looking around like he's never stepped foot inside the base before. Wherever this place is, he thinks, it's not much better than it had been outside. It's damp, cold, filthy, and in the narrow hallway he's having trouble keeping his wings from scraping against the ceiling.

He'd hoped that they wouldn't have much further to go, but she keeps leading him on further. He doesn't want to go any further, not if is means sitting in another horrible little room when the hallway is already horrible enough.

"Fauna." He stops and pulls away from her, dropping down to the floor and huffing out an exhausted breath. "Stop." He just sits for a little while, but when he finally looks back up to her, his face is pained and incredibly sad.

His mouth barely turns upwards from a grimace, but when he speaks, it's in a weary but joking tone. "Ever seen a fallen angel before?"

The further they travel into the base, the more perturbed Daine feels. It seems to have been abandoned some time ago, but how is that possible? Where is everyone? She shifts her ears to give herself a bat's hearing, but all she picks up are the echoes of the sounds she and Gabriel are making. There's no one else in the base, as far as she can tell. Even the rats are gone.

Gabriel's voice makes her start - it's much louder to a bat - and she hurriedly shifts her ears back to human. There's that word again: 'Fauna.' She'd thought it was some other language, but now it occurs to her that it's a name. The wrong name. And he's been using it for some time, now. As Gabriel sinks to the ground, she frowns worriedly down at him. Doesn't he know who she is?

He looks up at her, and her eyes prick in sympathy at his expression. She's used to cheer and sarcasm from Gabriel; all this pain would be difficult to take from anyone, but it's somehow even worse coming from him. Daine crouches beside him, shaking her head. "Angel - like the statues?" she asks, belatedly making that connection. They don't have angels in her realm, and she'd been initially baffled by all the statues of winged two-leggers scattered about the place until they'd been explained to her, and then she'd only been a little less confused. They seemed close enough to gods that she wasn't sure why folk didn't just call them as much. "You're an angel?"

"Not for much longer." He focuses on her, wondering why she wouldn't know that he's an angel. Hadn't she known him, before? He concentrates for a moment before he remembers.

Oh yes, she wouldn't know, because he'd been pretending to be a Norse god when they met. Or maybe he was actually a Norse god. When does the act become the truth? He sighs and chuckles. He's not going to be a god now. "I would have thought the wings gave it away."

Daine echoes his sigh, then sits down beside him. The angel matter is confusing - how can he just stop being something he is? - but she already feels a bit silly for not realizing what the wings meant sooner, and she's not sure she wants to keep asking questions if it's going to make her look like an idiot. Maybe she can look up angels in the library.

If the base still even has one. There's a more pressing concern: what's happened, here? "This is wrong," she says, gesturing at their surroundings. "The base is nicer than this - it should be, anyway. There should be other people here, or even just rats. It can't be empty." She wrinkles her nose a little, as if the emptiness is a personal insult, but there's a fair amount of worry beneath her confusion. Has the rift brought them to a completely different realm? One where there aren't any rebels?

Even if it has, that doesn't explain why Gabriel seems to be mistaking her for someone else. She turns to face him, brow furrowed. "Who's Fauna?"

"You are." He disregards the open question about the state of the base. As far as he's concerned, this is more or less what he'd expected. They have been cast into this barren snow globe of a city, why would it be inhabited? He's more concerned about why Fauna doesn't seem to know who she is. "Don't you remember?"

"I'm Daine," she corrects him. "The wildmage, remember?" She casts about for something they've done that would be hard to forget, but has a strangely difficult time coming up with anything. She's certain that they know each other, anyway, and if she knows that much, it's odd that Gabriel doesn't.

As she rubs her hand over her face in frustration, a more detailed memory finally presents itself, and she seizes upon it. "You - you said you'd show me your apartment, because I was living down here and you thought apartments were nicer, but I didn't like skyscrapers." It comes out in a sort of desperate, triumphant rush, and she gives him an expectant look, hoping he'll have some idea of what she's talking about.

After a long moment in which he really does think about it, he shakes his head. "No. I don't remember."

"Are you sure you aren't Fauna? I remember..." He smiles, like he's sharing a private joke with himself. "Do you remember...I dressed as a woman to enter your temple. And you-" He chuckles, then winces as it jostles his wings. "You laughed so hard. Said I could come back any time because I was worth a laugh." He looks up at her and the smile drops as he sees no comprehension on her face.

Her temple? He thinks she's a goddess? Well, he wouldn't be the first, though it's still a bit surprising. "I'm sorry," Daine says with a smile that's more wince than anything else. "I'm only... my da's a god. Weiryn." She doesn't expect Gabriel will have heard of him. "Ma was human, though."

He pulls back a little, looking dejected. "Daine, then." He seems reluctant to use the new name, like it doesn't quite feel appropriate. "Fauna was half-human, too." Not that many people knew about that, but it only made her more in touch with the women that she sought to serve, more fun to be around.

"She sounds nice," Daine offers, aware that it's not enough - that she's disappointed him by not being this 'Fauna.' It bothers her, perhaps more than it should. She just wants to help him, like he helped her before, with Yuri. Yuri.

Sitting bolt upright as this more recent memory presents itself, she exclaims, "You helped me stop Yuri when he got out of his cage! He was a bear, and I managed to get him to the park, and then you found us and knocked him out. Remember?" She hardly dares to hope, given that he doesn't seem to remember her at all, but having to face down a rampaging werebear seems harder to forget. "And then Romac captured us. I was able to get Yuri out, but..." her face falls as she realizes that it hadn't even occurred to her to try and get Gabriel out, too. Given how he can teleport, she figures he wouldn't have needed the help - but the ugly truth is that she just hadn't thought of him. She'd been too focused on Yuri and herself.

"I'm sorry," she says, staring down at her hands. "I should have come for you, too."

"It's alright. It is." He smiles up at Daine. He doesn't remember her or Yuri or any of it. He might feel different about it later, but for now he's willing to offer her any forgiveness she asks for.

In the next moment, his face contorts in pain and he crumples forward, curling in on himself. He moans, and light starts to seep out of his pores - his Grace, seeping out from underneath his skin. "Fauna. No, no, Daine. I'm sorry."

And then, everything disappears. Gabriel, the hallway, the city. He's woken up, leaving her behind in his dream scape.

A few minutes later, Gabriel returns. For a few moments, they're standing in a vast landscape watching two men who are, in turn, watching a burning city on the horizon.

Then, they're back in the hallway. Gabriel is surrounded by his own shed feathers, and he looks back, clenching his teeth in pain as he looks back at his own ragged wings. He doesn't even bother to collect them this time. "I think this might be a dream."

Daine shakes her head. It's not all right, and his forgiveness isn't worth much if he has no idea what she's talking about because he doesn't remember anything.

When he slumps forward, Daine reaches for him instinctively. There's light pouring out of him again, too much for her hands to contain, and she squints her eyes against the sudden brightness. "Gabriel? What's happening?"

And then he's gone. Everything's gone. She's surrounded by just... nothing. Daine turns in a circle, or tries to, but it's impossible to tell if she's really moving when the view is the same in every direction. "Gabriel?" she calls, but her voice sounds strangely muffled. "Gabriel!"

Nothing.

In a panic, she takes hawk shape, her wings beating frantically as she tries to escape, but there's no distance to cover. She might as well be hovering in place. She drops to the ground, panting, and then realizes that at least there seems to be a ground of some sort. Shifting into badger shape, she tries to dig, but whatever surface she's on seems to bend and flow around her claws. She leaves no mark.

Nothing.

Daine's still in badger shape when Gabriel returns, bringing a welcome change of scenery with him. Her claws sink into dirt, and she lets out a relieved whuff as she rakes through it. The ground is distracting enough that she barely glimpses the burning city before they're suddenly back in the base again. Blinking, she takes human shape again.

"Gabriel!" She almost wants to throw her arms around him in relief - and to make sure he doesn't go off and leave her again - but the state of his wings stays her. A hug would probably just hurt him. She settles for resting a hand on his shoulder.

"Oh." Relief swamps her again; she'd much rather this be a dream than reality. "Good." Well, good for her - Gabriel still looks awful. "What happened to you?" she asks, picking up a feather before she can remember it might not be a good idea for her to touch them. Nothing terrible happens - honestly, it just looks like an ordinary feather, if overlarge - and she sets it down in front of him before reaching for another. If he doesn't have the strength to gather them up, she can.

He responds tersely, painfully, "I woke up." That's about all that he's going to let her know.

He barely even remembers who she is, but he does know that she doesn't have the tools to help him here. All that he can do is make sure that she is safe if things go wrong with him. He hunches his shoulders forward and several large pinion feathers fall from his wings, their ends tipped in blood. The hallway, once cluttered with all manner of detail - trash, dust, little cracks in the concrete, now seems less defined. Except for the occasional door, there doesn't seem to be any detail at all.

He takes a few deep breaths before he speaks again. "Leave them," he says, meaning the feathers. "You should go."

Daine frowns as it belatedly occurs to her that he might be having as rough a time in the waking world as he is here. What's happening to him? What could send a demi-god into such a state?

Does Romac still have him?

She adds a few more feathers to the growing pile in front of him, her hand shaking. "You got away, didn't you?" she asks. Not that he seems to remember anything, but this is important. "You're not still in one of their cages...?" She knew she'd been wrong to forget him. Mithros, what if he's still trapped there? This is all her fault.

She's automatically reaching for another feather when he tells her to stop, and then she fists her hands in her lap. "I should've helped you," she says miserably.

A cage, he thinks. Yes. It's not just a room they've thrown him into. It must be a cage.

"No." He responds firmly. Whatever trouble he's in now, he knows that he doesn't want to get this girl involved. Not when she's already gotten out safely herself. Only...not so safely, because she's escaped only to be pulled into his mind.

There's no telling what could happen to her if he loses control while she's still here. She could be lost in some limbo forever, or her mind obliterated. With a force of will, he tries to push her consciousness out of his mind, but it doesn't even begin to work. He's fighting a war on too many fronts.

He huffs out a breath, frustrated and frightened that he might be starting to panic. "I got away," he lies, "but I'm tired. I need you out of my dream."

She doesn't believe him - surely it would take more than being tired to prompt a nightmare like this. Then again, things didn't go so well last time she ignored someone else's wishes because she thought she knew better and wanted to help. At least she had good reason to believe she could handle an angry bear, but whatever's going on with Gabriel is well beyond her experience.

"All right," she agrees with some reluctance. "But I don't know how to leave." Even when he'd woken up, she was still stuck despite her efforts to escape. Frowning, she adds, "I think something pulled me here."

"Just go!" He growls out in frustration, his wings bristling, his voice vibrating low and inhuman. For a few moments, the only impression he gives off is that of a cornered and injured animal lashing out. He drops his hands to the ground and digs his fingers in. The concrete gives way easily, as if it's made of sand.

Quickly though, his manner changes as he forces himself calm. He smooths his hands over the concrete, his eyes shut tightly as he takes a few deep breaths. His heart races, panic radiating out into the general atmosphere. "Daine. I can't get you out. Not now."

It takes a few breaths before he can speak again. "You said you could patch me up? I think...I don't know. It might help." He can't bring himself to look at her. It won't heal anything, or get him out of that white room, or get her out of here, but it might give them both something to focus on in the meantime.

Daine flinches a little at the outburst, but then thinks that maybe she should've expected it. She knows, better than most, how creatures can react when they're hurt, frightened, and trapped. This is different, of course: an injured hawk might scratch or nip her, or cuff her with its wings, but she's guessing it'd be far worse for her if Gabriel lashed out in earnest. They might only be dreaming, but this is his dream, not hers, and she doesn't like to think about what hands that can crumble concrete could do to a human body.

Her heart rate quickens, and it takes her a moment to realize the panic she feels isn't entirely hers - it's coming off Gabriel in waves, like the fear that stormwings bring into battle. Taking a deep breath, Daine pushes the panic aside, a task made easier by far too much practice facing off against stormwings. She'll be no use to Gabriel if she can't keep her head, and if she can't help him somehow, she's in trouble.

"All right," she says, automatically lapsing into the low, soothing tone she'd use with a spooked animal she was trying to settle. "We'll just have to wait a little while before we try again." Maybe it needs to be a joint effort, with him trying to push her out while she tries to leave.

His suggestion that she patch him up gives her pause - she'd made the offer before she'd known that the base was abandoned, and hadn't he said it was no use? - but only for a moment. At least they'd be doing something, and she might feel a bit less helpless than she does, now. "The medics' room is close by. Some of their stuff might still be there." She frowns a little as she gives him an appraising look. "Can you make it? Elsewise I could go and come back with whatever I find there."

"Of course I can make it," he grouses. Though, when he goes to stand up, he stumbles and has to brace himself against the wall. "Shit. I can. I may need some help." Then he just has to laugh through the pain, because needing help seems like an understatement at this point.

He stands, bent over, his hand still propped against the wall. He laughs until he starts coughing, then looks across at her. He knows he's deteriorating fast, losing all of his Grace, but he needs to keep going. "How close by?"

The effort he has to pour just into standing up is alarming, and Daine wavers uncertainly between the urge to help and her worry that she'll only hurt him if she tries. When he admits that he needs the assistance, though, she steps forward to take the hand he isn't using to prop himself upright (or as close to 'upright' as he can get).

"It's just down that side corridor, maybe ten yards," she says, gesturing to said corridor's entryway a little ways down the hall. She starts to sling his arm over her shoulders, then hesitates. "I can just carry you, too, if it's easier."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Hello Darkness My Old Friend [Open to Multiple]

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject