cold_dry_pieces | |[ 017 ]|

I.
It’s cold and wet, which is never a good combination. There’s not enough light to see where you are or what’s around you, but the slightest sliver of white is visible in the corner where the sides of this structure don’t quite meet.

Whatever you’re sitting in... it’s thick, and when you’ve let yourself rest in one place for too long it clings to you, thick dark clots that you can’t wipe off because everything else is soaked through, too. It’s hard to know how long you’ve been here; your stomach’s long since stopped growling and you’re starting to feel a bit dizzy, but there’s nowhere to go. The space seems huge but it’s all the same, there’s nothing to be gained by walking around. No way out.

There’s an unpleasant taste in your throat, like you’ve been sucking on pennies.

II.
The walls of this room are white, but it’s clear someone’s tried to make it seem homey. The bright sun streaming through the windows falls on warm, honey-colored wood. A tiny bed, a small round table strewn with crayons and papers, a chair before it. There’s a small dresser against the wall with an empty goldfish bowl on it.

You know, without knowing why, that they’ll be coming for you again, soon. That they’ll ask you questions, and you know you won’t have the right answers for them. You won’t be punished. You’ll be thanked for being so cooperative. And then they’ll bring you back here, and they’ll leave again, and they won’t tell you all the things you need to know.

III.
The headache is dizzying, and you can’t remember how you got here; but you’re gulping air down like it’s a privilege to breathe. Your shoulders ache, arms bound behind you and out of sight, stretched unnaturally around the narrow surface you’re on. It’s hard to say what it is, you can’t turn your head enough to see and you’re too numb from the cold to guess what it is by feel. Your ankles are bound as well, tight enough that there’s little room for movement.

All you can really do is peer into the shadows and wait.

[ooc; open to all! each thread will be treated as a separate instance, unless otherwise arranged. Feel free to enter into any of the scenarios tho the dream might jump between them after, in no particular order <3 all threads ~~may~~will contain disturbing images/topics. May be slow but will backdate forever. If you’re interested in dream!injury/death/etc (which doesn’t necessarily mean real-world injury but might mean real pain,) please ping me via PM or something~]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Saya moves through the blood, quietly, and to where someone is crying. She doesn't know much about children - all of her siblings are older, and on the besides, the most she knows to do with children is eat them.

But this one is crying.

"Are you lost?"

The question, the voice-- it's an interruption, a break in a very old pattern. The intrusion forces a stirring of conscious awareness; and so, once she speaks, there is no crying child.

There's a tall shadow behind her. It whispers, loud only by comparison.

"You shouldn't be here..."

Saya looks behind her, and is quiet for a moment. "This isn't my dream," she says, which isn't acknowledgment, but rather is a statement of fact. She doesn't care, really, if she should or shouldn't be here.

"Hello."

"It isn't a dream."

Of course, it is; but he doesn't dream, so why should it be? And it's more than that, as well. The shadow wavers, shifting a little nearer, lingering just at the edge of solidity. What might be hands reach for her wrists, trying to pin her.

What might be hands don't have to work hard to pin her, because she doesn't fight it. She simply looks up into the darkness, and her smile gets more coy, less easy to interpret.

"Then what is this?"

"A fortunate opportunity."

The whisper sounds a little less certain, though. Something about the way she smiles is unsettling. And it's less fun when they don't fight back.

One hand wraps around both of her wrists, bigger than it ought to be with the flexible logic of dreams; the other grabs her by the throat, as he considers.

"Why are you here?"

Saya doesn't stop smiling, even though the hand is on her throat. To begin with, he can't kill her, not in a dream, and Saya doesn't believe in revenge for intention. There is no act here.

"I'm here to make you uncomfortable. And you are, aren't you?"

Even his intention is instinctual; bred, not born. Or born here, if you count it that way (as he does.) Born in blood. But she's right; there's something wrong, and he doubts, shadow fingers flickering uncertainly over her throat, tracing about to find a pulse.

As tempting as she is, she shouldn't be here; here is not where this sort of thing happens. He doesn't let go so much as he dissolves, and when the shadow parts the blood is gone, leaving her in the white-walled room.

A little boy is sitting at the table, using crayons to draw overlapping red and blue trees.

She is bloodless now, as she walks across the white-walled room to where the boy is drawing. Red and blue trees, overlapping: Saya recognizes a circulatory system when she sees one, being intimately familiar with various kinds.

"What are you waiting for?"

"Doctors," he answers promptly, dispassionately. He glances up at her fearlessly, wide-eyed and... well, seemingly like any other child... then turns back to his work. Satisfied with the intricate tracery of lines he sets the crayons aside and starts to fold the paper as one would a fan, into narrow, even strips; once they're blocked out he begins creasing the edges in earnest.

"You're not one of them."

Saya shakes her head. "No," she says. "I'm not a doctor." She reaches down, and sketches a heart with a red crayon - not a cartoon heart, but a real one, with veins.

"Why are you waiting for doctors?"

"Dunno," he answers patiently, looking with interest at her drawing. He pauses in tearing the first strip off his circulatory system to turn the heart upside-down and regard it for a moment, head cocked to one side.

"They're supposed to help. But I don't think I'm sick. And they won' tell me where my brother is."

She offers it to him, and gives him a purple crayon to do what he likes with it. "I would very much dislike it if someone didn't let me see my brother," she tell hims, her eyebrows raising a little.

"What's your brother's name?"

He draws a loose and wobbly circle around it, starting from the bottom and veering off straight down before the lines meet, but when she asks the question it distracts him so the wax stick slides, scrawling at a haphazard angle across the page and onto the desk.

"Dexter," he answers with a sudden urgency. "He's only little. I'm supposed to take care of him."

Saya does not fiddle. She watches him, instead. There are things that children say, that adults do not, and in dreams, the difference is especially pronounced. "Why do you have to take care of him? Don't your parents take care of the both of you?"

"Our mom took care of us."

He looks away, and returns to his first paper, neatly tearing away another strip.

"She said I have to look after him now 'cos she's gone."

He doesn't look sad, not in the least. Sad hasn't gotten him anywhere, so he's given up on feeling.

Saya's smile is coy, but she raises an eyebrow. "And now you're here alone." She folds her long fingers.

"Are you afraid?" Fear is an emotion Saya understands on a peripheral level. She experiences fear, of course, when she is in water, but when she's not it's difficult for her to connect the emotion as something she truly understands.

"Afraid of what?"

He looks up at her again, with eyes far older than a little boy's eyes ought to be. With what he's seen, what he's lost, there aren't many horrors left to the imagination.

Her smiles widens, almost shows teeth, but not quite. The flash of white is from the next words she speaks alone.

"I like you."

"Okay," he answers, with a child's simplicity. His attention turns back to dissecting his paper.

|[ 017 ]|

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