I dreamed I had a name...

[_fredless]

Who:Winifred Burkle and YOU
What: Her Headspace
When: Anytime After Friday Evening
Where: Fred's Room (She won't be leaving it)
Rating: TBD (Darker themes present including slavery and torture)

Comments

[onemanshort]

This recent change had left Kaylee mostly unaffected. It was unsettling, seeing everyone's thoughts displayed, but she hadn't gone looking to pry into anyone's past. After all, when you lived with thieves and ex-soldiers, you knew how to keep a secret and let others keep them as well.

But Fred was a friend, and a friend who had just lost someone she cared about. When Kaylee hadn't heard from her for awhile, she made her way to the tower Fred had been describing only a short while before and hiked her way up the stairs in search of the other girl's room.

What's waiting on the other side of the door, however, isn't anything that she expected to find.

*"Wo de ma."

*Mother of God

[_fredless]

Her fingers tighten on the limestone at the voice, recognition carrying through her body. But she doesn't stop writing. If anything, there's an increase in her efforts, something almost frenetic in her pace.

There's still so much that needs to be said.

[onemanshort]

"Fred?" Stepping cautiously into the cave, Kaylee's eyes slid over the writing that covered all the available surfaces, but it was without actual comprehension. It was merely taking in the sheer amount of it before she focused back on her tattered and cowed friend. "Fred, what's goin' on? What is all this?"

[_fredless]

She hesitates, fingers curling tight over the chalky limestone.

"I already did all the writing. How'm I supposed to do all that, and the explaining too?"

Don't make her explain.

Last day of Headspace

[demonologist]

Wes is sitting in a corner, watching silently while Fred continues to add more writing to the walls, more smears of white which are tinged with pink from her now shredded fingers

[_fredless]

He's come back again.

She doesn't need to look over her shoulder to know that he's there. She can feel his eyes, moving over her and her words alike. And not just moving, but reading and comprehending and she fights a need to cover certain words and phrases with the palm of her hand, fingers splayed. In her head she imagines them stretching further out than could ever be possible -- protecting.

And not just her from him. But him from them.

It feels bigger than her. It all feels bigger than her.

He's different tonight, she thinks. Warmer. Sitting back in his corner, the man with the gentle voice and knowing hands. There's a heat about him that is subtly altering the damp, aged air held in my stone walls.

Wesley. His name is Wesley.She looks at the wall again, wondering where he fits. Only to freeze at the hard, hot edges in his voice. She wants her own attention back but he's captured it. It isn't fair

[demonologist]

"Fred..."

There's so much being said in the utterance of that single syllable. A palimpsest of emotional layers, so pressed together that they're almost indistinguishable from each other. His expression is torn, he feels for her, but he also knows that he can't let this go on. She's unravelling. Bleeding herself out onto these illusionary walls.

He steels himself again.

"You can. And you have. When Angel encountered you, you'd already taken it off. You figured it out. Look, there."

He points at the diagram on the wall. The instructions as to how to take the collar off.

"The only thing keeping that collar around your neck...is you."

[_fredless]

It isn't so much that she shrinks from the name, as much as the way he says it. She can't remember how to be the person he's talking to. And that's what he wants, isn't it? That's what they all...

The collar feels inexplicably tighter. Which it shouldn't. It just shouldn't. They've had an understanding for a while now, had more than one conversation on the matter. She wouldn't hurt it, if it didn't hurt her. Ad as long as it what exactly as it was. Where it was. She needed to know where it was. And now it was moving? Constricting? And on his word, not hers?

There it is. The hurt.

"...stop." He needs to stop. "It...you don't know what it can do. You haven't seen. You can't know."

He can't know. But she did. Of course she did. After all, it's the way it works, isn't it? The way you learn, the way you know. It's all just trial and error. The only reason that picture sat so clearly on the wall was because someone else'd tried.

And then her own sticky hands, studying the error.