There's a new world shattering the silence. A new world I'm afraid to see.
One more midnight passes.
The firstborns are ripped out of their dreamworlds and dropped back into Chicago, disoriented and confused, but otherwise okay. With them, comes the return of all the tech and vehicles that were down while the plagues were going on.
As the sun rises, all that is left of the plagues are the corpses of monster and humanoid, ( Read more... )
The firstborns are ripped out of their dreamworlds and dropped back into Chicago, disoriented and confused, but otherwise okay. With them, comes the return of all the tech and vehicles that were down while the plagues were going on.
As the sun rises, all that is left of the plagues are the corpses of monster and humanoid, ( Read more... )
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Her knees hit the floor of the Conrad's infirmary so hard they go numb, and Ruvin has no idea where she is or why she hurts again when all she felt and all she could say for the last--
forever
was nothing.
Ruvin throws up. She keeps her face close to the floor and the smell because the smell at least lets her know that something has changed even if she doesn’t want to know what.
I want to go home.
“I would never,” she whispers.
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Winny is on the floor, staring at nothing, feeling around for Dan's hand because Dan has to be there now, he has to be there now, he has to be there now, right?
"I don't. I don't. P... Th... I don't."
It's over now.
It's all over now.
Right?
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Again.
The first thing he notices is that there's no grass underneath him, and no sky, and no sound of the ocean. There's a ceiling and a floor and people he doesn't recognize, and someone's just grabbed his hand. Someone with cold skin.
He's not on the Island; he's in Chicago, and Winny's next to him.
Laughing may not be the best reaction to all this, but he's so relieved and so happy to realize he didn't just dream all this, didn't dream up her.
More than that, he thinks this might be a sign. He could have died. At any point this week, he could have died, but he didn't. He may have been wrong.
He might not have to use that stupid record metaphor, anymore.
And he didn't break his promise.
"Hey," he says, moving over to Winny and setting a protective hand against her back. "Are you okay?"
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When she can make herself talk again, it's to his collarbone. She runs her fingers over it. "Hi," she whispers. "I missed you."
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"I missed you, too," he mutters. "Thought I lost you. Are you okay?"
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He relaxes into it, closes his eyes and leans back. He'll sort out where he is, when he is, and what he needs to do in a minute.
Right now--
"Adios, papi."
Right now he just is going to sit here, and smile a little, and be okay.
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She puts way too much momentum into that act, sending them both tumbling to the floor. She's on him at once, kneeling beside him, hands touching/caressing/rubbing everywhere they can reach as if checking him for damage. She stares down at him for a moment and then she crumples, curling into him, arms tight around his body.
The only word she manages to choke out before she dissolves into heaving sobs is his name, breathed against his shoulder where she buries her face.
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He holds her close, torn between the urge to crush her into a hug and to just gently run his hands over every part of her until he's satisfied that she's safe and whole.
"Mi niña. Mi niña preciosa. Estoy de regreso y prometo que nunca, nunca te volvere a dejar."
His accent is so much thicker. It's hard to think in English, just now, harder than it's worth to translate the words. Even if she doesn't understand them, it doesn't matter. He's here.
Adrian presses a kiss against Rachel's forehead.
He's alive.
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He's alive.
She holds him tight, tilting her chin up and nuzzling along his jaw, his chin, until her mouth finds his. She kisses him deeply, pouring rather a lot of emotion into it.
She's alive too. Never more so than right now, here, in his arms.
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He wasn't expecting the damage to come walking in the front door and up the main stairs.
He's just leaving the second-floor hallways and stepping onto the balcony when he sees Sark, looking like he was the other half of the split order of fifty different kinds of Hell this week has been. Or another third, or fourth, or fifth, or (number of people in Chicago)th. He pauses, then steps up to the balcony railing to rest his hands.
"She's probably debriefing," he says. Yeah, he can put things together. He always was good, when he paid attention.
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So Suzie must have told him or he figured it out on his own, somehow. Far be it for Sark to suggest he understands what goes on in that head. He doesn't really care right now.
"I'll wait for her in the lounge," he says curtly. "I assume it hasn't been flooded."
He has nothing he particularly wants to say to the man right now... If ever.
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"That'd be quite a feat," J says, tilting his head. In any case, the water would probably not stay in the lounge. It'd probably spill out into the hall and slowly make its way downward.
There's a lot that J could say. You look like seventeen kinds of hell, or You know, I could tell you your forture from the measure of your stride, or just Who was it? Who, not what, because Sark doesn't have the air of one roughed up by circumstance. Someone's gone and rewritten the way he interacts with the people he's already indicated both fear and submission to, and that doesn't tend to just happen.
What comes out is a surprisingly gentle "It's none of my business."
They've been through enough for the moment. There's no need to start this dance up again now.
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J comes back exactly eleven minutes and seventeen seconds after midnight, because someone wanted to make a point about who was in charge here.
He stumbles back into conventional existence and blinks, because while, yes, he was just wandering this hall, it feels like something's changed. It's feels like something-
Like there was something-
He shakes his head, but the feeling moves in waves between his ears. There was something there, something like falling to his knees, something in his mind-
There is something missing in his mind.
His journal is on him. He rips it out, skims the latest page, and it's a day later than it should be - death of the Firstborn, sure, but it doesn't feel like remembering death, didn't feel like coming back, it felt like ( but... there are empty spaces, yeah? -you can't remember, can you?)
It felt like he did something.
Something happened.
But he has no idea what.
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She's not going to say anything just yet, but just... be there, being neither threatening nor submissive.
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By the time Suzie gets there he's trying not to pace, and is as a result only pacing in short staccato movements crisscrossing the floor. Start-stop, move-stop, step-stop, and nowhere he steps is better than the place before.
He should say something. He should leave. He should try something. He should do nothing. Why isn't nothing enough?
He pauses when Suzie comes near. He glances over at her, not quite turning to face her, and grimaces. He's either going insane again, or he's taking up his victims-cum-wardens' time with theatrics. Neither option is exactly palatable.
"'Siehst, Vater'," he says. German, he's only got conversational basics in - but it doesn't matter, he's a head for words and fixed phrases, and some things haunt you, some things stick with. "'du den Erlkönig nicht ( ... )
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"I watch with envious eyes and mind," she murmurs,
" the single-souled, who dare not feel
The wind that blows beyond the moon,
who do not hear the Fairy Reel.
If you don't hear the Fairy Reel,
they will not pause to steal your breath.
When I was young I was a fool.
So wrap me up in dreams and death."
A pause, then. "That's a modern one, I'll admit, but I'm rather fond of it."
She glances at him sidelong. "I've got reasons of my own for wanting to know what the Sifr have been doing with you, maybe with all of us." Her hand flexes for a moment, an unconscious movement that he'll have seen before, the motion of settling one's hand into a metal gauntlet, and then she catches herself and goes completely and unsettlingly still.
"History," she says, "shouldn't be allowed to repeat itself."
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