Dream | 01
[Private: Sketchy and erratic, like a bad camera feed; grainy at best and incomprehensible at worst. Prior knowledge of Allelujah or the events may allow for better visualisation.]
It was always cold, so this must be colder than cold. If he concentrates he can see the air in front of him thicken and cloud with every shallow exhale, and it makes him want to reach out and wrap his hands around it, pull it close before it can vanish and mean one more breath gone. One more breath gone, one more piece of air, and space crowds into its absence.
"We're going to die, aren't we?"
The words are low, dull, and he thinks he tightens his arm but he's not really sure because it became hard to tell where he started and the body tucked against him ended a long time ago. Warmth, Eight had said, placidly logical as ever. We don't have 'nough power for heat, but if we gather together we should stay warm.
He has to swallow a few times, the frigid air drying out everything it touched. "Help will come. It will."
For a while he thinks his words weren't loud enough to make it across even that small a space, but then the other moves. Feeling remains enough that he knows that Anton is pulling away - not far, he doesn't have the energy, but far enough that it makes Allelujah look over and up slightly, to the sunken eyes that have become the trademark feature of all the children on the shuttle.
"Before we freeze? Before we starve? Or after?"
"Anton..." Stop, he wants to stay, stop, don't think like that, but Anton is already talking again.
"I don't want to die like this. Not like this, not...not helpless and..." Anton sucks in a breath, deeper than he should but Allelujah can't make himself remind his friend of this because Anton is shaking, he's close enough to see every tremble, and it dissolves the following words into a weak and shaky jumble. "I'd rather, I'd rather you...kill me, Allelujah."
It's a joke, really, almost, Anton's attempt at composure - littlest Allelujah, just about knocked over backwards by firing anything bigger than a pistol! - but it's lost in in the sudden sense of blinding wrongness that makes him flinch, snapping his head sideways in search of a predator, but the dark corridors are empty. Lost in the look in Anton's eyes that says it wasn't meant to be all that funny anyway.
"No," he says to that look. "No, I-I can't..."
And then he chokes, chokes on a scream because the wrongness that has crept and whispered and cocked its head in mocking curiosity is there, it's there, and something is wrong, so wrong, and he has just enough time to think I'm falling, only when he flings his arms out to catch hold its a gun they're wrapping around, palming it comfortably as he has never done, and wrongness is sweeping through his mind with an intimacy even Marie has never brought about, caressing even as it coils itself around his throat.
"I can."
Ha-! *Strangled cut-off*
...
Even here...
[/private]
A dream...while dreaming? *Pause* There is something else to this place.