2019-12-17: Asleep and Drowning: Difference between revisions

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*'''Log: Asleep and Drowning'''
*'''Log: Asleep and Drowning'''
*'''Cast:''' [[Lan Lilac::Lan Lilac]], [[Loren Voss::Loren Voss]]
*'''Cast:''' [[Lan Lilac]], [[Loren Voss]]
*'''Where:''' Damzena Base
*'''Where:''' Damzena Base
*'''Date:''' Dec 16, 2019
*'''Date:''' Dec 16, 2019

Revision as of 07:04, 23 December 2019

  • Log: Asleep and Drowning
  • Cast: Lan Lilac, Loren Voss
  • Where: Damzena Base
  • Date: Dec 16, 2019
  • Summary: Lan wakes up from a nightmare and seeks absolution. Loren realizes something.
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.

She comes to with a jolt, heart in her throat.

It's dark in her room. There are no stars this deep in the base, in her tiny room without a window - she scrabbles at the bedside lamp until it comes on at her touch, throwing the spareness of her surroundings into relief. A single bed, a chair, a monitor, a lamp, a chest of drawers for her few personal items. Even if she's replaced some of the provided things with some personal touches, it's still an unfamiliar room.

It still reminds her too much of Solaris.

It's too much. She can't stay here. She doesn't want to be here.

She mustn't leave.

Lan scrubs at her face and takes a deep breath to try and calm down. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's FINE.

She wraps herself in the blanket and opens the door. Nobody will see her, except maybe night patrols. There's never a time when /everybody/ is asleep. But...!

She pads quickly but quietly to Loren's quarters, a few halls away, and taps once on the door. Wake up. Wake up. Please wake up.

If she has to be alone out here she's not going to be able to hold herself together and Lan /really/ doesn't want Leah to see her cry--


<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.

As it happens, he's not asleep.

Not because he's on lateshift, or readjusting his sleep patterns in anticipation of a shift change, or anything like that. No, he's awake because he's lying flat on his back, scrolling through another report he's retrieved off of the SLM (Solaris Library of Medicine) on the pharmacodynamics of Drive.

...He's distantly sure there are more studies than what he's read. There has to be something that more accurately defines the upper threshold limit for a First Class citizen. Trial data was conducted among Lamb study participants, so he can work out from this what the upper limit is for that population, and it indicates if he uses /that/ somewhat disenheartening prospects for his own needs.

Unless, possibly, the tolerance could be higher for one of the elect? That would have to be the case--

Unless the individual in question were deficient in some way.

He grimaces at that thought, skimming upwards at speed past the study he's read with a defiant swipe of his thumb, as if to similarly slam the door shut on that line of thinking.

No good. Maybe he can find something on the chemical data, if it's not classified--

This is when an insistant tap comes at his door.

"Yes? What's going on?" he calls out, setting aside the tablet on the bedside table and rising to open the door.

/Someone had better have died,/ he thinks, grimly. Otherwise he's just going to be--

"...Lan?" Irritation gives way to complete confusion. "Are you... sleep walking or something?"

Lambs do that sometimes, he's read.


<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.

If she's sleepwalking, she at least has the courtesy to knock rather than just barge in. But the Lan on his theoretical doorstep is a far cry from the calm, cheerful, mostly-practical girl that bid him good evening a few short hours ago. This one looks badly shaken, like she's a few breaths away from tears.

She scrubs at the side of her face, either not hearing his question about sleepwalking or unable to process it. "Loren, I'm sorry, I know it's late, but I," she pauses, dragging the blanket higher up her shoulders. "...I just... He was..."

She doesn't want to say it. At least, not out loud. It might become real.

The Stranger might take Loren too. And then who will Lan have left? Her lips thin to a bloodless line, tears welling up in her eyes. Asha is...

She steps past him, into the unfamiliar 'safety' of another semi-known place, and looks around like she's never seen it before. "...I just..."

She folds herself into a ball at the foot of his bed, dragging the blanket up around herself like a coccoon, and tucks her feet up beneath her. "I'm sorry."


<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.

Loren realizes his error the moment his gaze settles on her face. Not asleep.

He does not immediately think 'nightmare', looking at her. Instead, the cold sensation blooming in the depths of his chest is a good deal more... complicated. He takes a step back, as if to wordlessly invite her in, and once she's entered, closes the door behind the both of them, sealing them off -- effectively, if not completely -- from the rest of the base.

He studies her in silence as she enters, murmuring that she was... something.

That a 'he'... something.

He watches her in silence still as she approaches the foot of his bed and makes herself a sort of nest there. He's almost afraid to say anything.

/...Idiot./ Even as a sort of third observer, standing catty-corner to what he sees and what he feels, simply shakes his/its head at the whole of his reaction and sighs at it all.

There's not much to speak of in his room -- hardly more than when Lan had last come in, all those weeks ago. He's not given to decoration, as she knows from his room back home. The only exception is the partially completed model that she'd given him, then.

The bed creaks when he sits down on it, near to the foot of the bed.

/This isn't your problem,/ the pragmatic part of him says. Go tell her to talk to the active clinic staff about it or something.

/But she's my responsibility. ...Just like the others./

The pragmatic side of him had lost when it had come to information-gathering, too.

"...Hey," he finally says, giving voice at last to what he dreads. "Did... someone hurt you?"


<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.

He doesn't look as upset as she'd thought he would. It's kind of a relief. She was worried he'd be really upset, especially if she woke him up. "Sorry," she repeats herself a bit helplessly, but shakes her head. Calm down. Maybe it's not fine right now, but it's going to be. He joins her on the edge of the bed and something relaxes inside her chest.

Even Lan forgets, sometimes, just how much difference a friend makes.

She blinks over at him, a bit owlishly, when he asks if someone hurt her. How did he know? She becomes reminded of the scar on her stomach, the fading pink of the wound that had taught her real fear.

Lan looks at him, really looks at him, and something clicks together in her head. What she'd said. What he'd asked. And blurts out, "Uh- no! No, not-- not like that. I mean yes, I was hurt, but not--" She struggles for the words. How to say 'I had a nightmare' without sounding like a child. "...It was a long time ago," Lan manages. She lets the blankets fall around her waist, fingers hesitating on the hem of her pajama top.

And though he's seen it before - Lan doesn't like hiding from the sun - there's something vulnerable about how she lifts her shirt just enough to show him the gnarled scar tissue. "I just... I dreamed about when it happened," she admits, because she can't let Loren wonder about /that/. "I'm sorry I--" She gesturely a bit helplessly around as if to say 'barged in during the middle of the night'. "I dreamed about the Stranger and I just, I couldn't stand being by myself."


<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.

He was already awake.

And then, seeing that look on her face...

That settles it.

So he takes a seat, at long last, by her side on the bed -- covers still rumpled from his own failure to sleep and agitated research via the tablet, its screen still illuminating the nearby wall and bed softly.

"O... oh," he utters, looking away from her. He lifts a hand to fidget with glasses that aren't there, and has to settle for letting that hand lamely drop to his lap. It's almost shameful the amount of relief he has about /that/; he can't quite bring himself to look her in the eye. "So... are you sick? You'd be better off going to the..."

To his credit he trails off when she says that she was hurt a long time ago.

She shifts next to him, and out of reflex, he turns his head towards her, catching by the faint glow of the screen on the table by his head the darker shadow of the scar on her stomach.

/That./

"Oh... him. You had a nightmare," he says, and absently, his right hand in his lap inches towards his own stomach. There's no scar for him. He... he can't really remember what happened. Just that Azazel seriously wounded him, and... That's it.

His expression twists slightly. As much as he probes the memory, it seems nearly absent, worn away as if someone had taken a cloth to a wet painting and smeared it into near-oblivion. He...

Turns away from that realization, shaken by it. ...So she'd dreamt about about Azazel and it had bothered her. Enough that she'd come... here.

"Oh. So that's it," he remarks, staring down at his lap. "Well... I wasn't sleeping anyway."

He's silent for a long moment.

"You know, I'm not... there's other people who..." he starts, stops, starts, then trails out again when he realizes that, no, technically speaking, there isn't anyone else she can turn to.

Not here. If she could go back to her mother, it'd be better, but--

He entangles his fingers in his lap, twisting his hands together. There's a good reason she can't go and do that.

"...I guess it's just me."

Loren's silent again.

"I don't... I mean, I'm not... you're..."

Then he just gives up and sighs.

"I don't have /friends/," he points out, looking away from her. Meaning, he doesn't know what to do here, not anymore. "I don't know what good I'll do for you other than, I don't know. Sitting here? But that's all I've got. You can take it or leave it."


<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.

In the morning, maybe, she'll have the good grace to be properly sorry for making him worry. But underneath the embarrassment about her own weaknesses, Lan is surprised to feel something like gratitude. She wasn't certain that he would even let her in. So to see Loren worried for her - awkward, a little nervous, even a little kind - it's a relief.

That he isn't upset, sure. But also that he's just that human.

He tells her there are other people, and Lan watches him realize that no, there really aren't. And he's right, and they both know it. Leah, while Lan likes her a lot, thinks of her as a bit of the big sister she would have liked to have, is not the same as the two of them.

Lan has Loren here. That's it.

And because Loren is the only person she has, if something were to happen to him--

She tugs the blanket back up over her shoulders. "...You don't have to do anything," she tells him, looking down at her knees. "But... can I... tell you some stuff? I've been carrying it with me for so long."

She knows she shouldn't. She knows that Loren's own memories are muddled right now. That he may be fragile, more than ever before. "I just..." She trails off again, before gritting her teeth for a moment. "He killed my-- he killed /me/-- but here I am. He killed me. I'm so scared that he's going to come back. I'm so scared he's going to kill you or Leah next time and you /won't/ come back, it'll just be me and eventually I'm going to be too tired, or too scared, or too sad to say no anymore."

Lan rests her head in her hands, long hair spilling past in a curtain. "I don't know what he wants. He killed Asha, and I..."


<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.

It's... complicated. It's complicated, and after tonight, he might have to do some sorting out of his feelings -- if he doesn't shunt them aside like usual.

She's just a Lamb, a part of him resounds. But he still owes her his life, and perhaps not just the once, when he thinks about it. And she's... he's been relying on her a lot -- as shameful as it is -- and she'd said she thought of him as a friend, and he's...

...not sure what he thinks about that, when he investigates that feeling, right now.

But he does know what he was feeling just moments ago.

As inappropriate as they were, for someone like him. He should act more like one of the elect -- he still remembers when Major Yugh had struck him for that failure -- but... Even though he's got everything to lose if this becomes some sort of scandal, with his reputation, he's... he still can't just kick her out of here. It seems... wrong.

Especially when she has nowhere else to go. Especially when part of the reason why that is so is /him/.

He's silent a moment, staring down at his hands in his lap.

"I can listen," he says. That's easy. Of course he can listen--

He killed her, she says.

Loren turns to look at her, watching her when she speaks, watching her as she gives in to a paroxysm of fear, her face just about vanishing under a wave of blonde hair.

What should he say to that? That he's not about to die that easily? That Leah herself has come about as near to death and back as any?

...To say no? ...Asha?

He doesn't say anything at first. Loren just reaches over slowly to take one of her wrists, peeling it firmly but gently away from where it tangles with her own hair and slides his fingers up to the point where the artery rests. His hand stays like that for a good minute. His lips move as if he's counting something off.

Finally he releases his grip on her wrist.

"...Your pulse is elevated but not abnormal, considering," he says. "Generally speaking, dead people don't have a pulse."

Lunata didn't.

"...You're not dead," he tells her. "He probably... messed with you," he continues, a vague memory of a distortion crawling across the cracked glass of his mind. "With your mind, I mean."

He's silent after that.

"...What do you mean, 'say no anymore'? And who's Asha?"


<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.

When he takes her wrist Lan doesn't protest, doesn't shrink away. But neither does she lift her head to look at him. It's strange to feel his hand against her skin. She doesn't hate it, certainly. It's the closest thing to comfort she's had since the last time Lan set foot in Little Firelight. She can't hate it.

It's a moment before she realizes what he's counting. Nerd, she thinks almost fondly.

"I..." And Lan knows that she's alive. That her body has a pulse and breathes without being told to. But she also remembers watching herself drown, and suffer, and die endlessly.

In the end, she couldn't save Ashansi, either.

"I don't know what he wants from me," she repeats tiredly, tugging her wrist free of Loren's hand to wrap both arms around herself. "No matter how hard I fight, or how far I run... nothing matters. He's always there. And I die. Or worse."

"..." She's silent for a long moment, trying to find words. Because... what was Ashansi to her, after all? A man that was only real because he wanted to be, and in the end...

"He said he loved me," she finally says. "But I don't know if he was ever real. Because I don't remember when we met. I only remember hanging out with him, training with him, going on adventures with him. And the only time I ever said yes to the Stranger, it was to save him, but--" Lan gulps for a breath, the memory of stardust creeping up from deep in her lungs. "But he died anyway. Sort of. It's complicated. He went to sleep."


<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.

If he could remember it right, he could tell her now that he also was killed countless times when facing off against Azazel alone. That his own blade in his brother's phantom's grasp had run him through, slit his throat, torn him limb from limb. But this is no longer a story he can tell anyone: the ragged hole in his memory widens with every passing day, and even the figure of his brother -- even a phantasm thereof -- is not exempt.

Indeed, the memory of his brother is /particularly/ not exempt.

He lets go of her hand freely, settling back into his more aloof posture from before.

So 'he' is after her... he sees something in her that he wants. That's clear.

"Ah."

He gazes down at his own hands. He remembers...

Yeah. This one he remembers, if in fragmented jagged sections. That had been his own corpse in Gethsemane. The dying he doesn't remember. Just the fact that there had been his -- their -- bodies in that place. And he remembers Azazel had tried to kill her again. He had rammed a broken-off pipe through the man. It had only been an illusion, too.

He curls his hands into fists.

"If he just wanted you dead, you would already be dead," he says. "Maybe... that applies to the rest of us, too. I don't know anything about him. /We/ don't. He's something from..." He trails off, nearly speaking too much. "...Forget it. If you're in here, he can't get to you. He'd have to kill everyone in here first." He doesn't sound -- not entirely at least -- like he believes even Azazel can accomplish that. Though his fists tighten. Whiteknuckle, even.

"He said he loved me," she says, and Loren's attention whips over to her.

But she doesn't even know if he existed. Just that--

"...Did anyone else ever see him? That would answer it," he says after a moment, approaching the issue almost too logically.

/Did she love him?/ he doesn't ask, because it seems too raw a thing to ask, even for him.

Instead, he just asks, "Say yes to what? What did he ask you to do?"

Even if it didn't save him. Asha. The man who may or may not have existed.


<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.

It sounds horrible to say, but Lan can't help how she feels. "I wish he only wanted me dead." Dying is simple. Nearly anybody can do it.

But Loren says - /almost/ says - something. "From...?" But he doesn't finish it. Lan knows that there are things that he can't tell her. To think that one of them concerns the Stranger, that he may have to keep a secret from her about /this/ of all things... Isn't it cruel?

But she can't ask him.

"Asha said he was from a place in the sky once," Lan recalls slowly. "That maybe he wasn't cut out for being a prince, so he fell to Filgaia. And other people saw him, but..." If one person is an illusion, how many other people might be? "What if he was in my head the whole time - and so were all those other people? What if we never did any of those things?"

She finally looks up at him, the sheaves of her hair slithering down her shoulders. "It never made any sense. The Stranger... none of what he said made sense to me. He wants me to give in but I... I don't know to what. A song. Ashansi mentioned a song, once..." she murmurs slowly.

It had deafened her, drowned out her own pulse and dragged her onto the wheel of its eternal alien rhythm. And nobody had been there to save her. "He just... I think he's where Asha came from. I don't know. And then when Asha went to sleep, when the Stranger killed him for the last time, I couldn't leave him. I just couldn't." Lan looks down at her empty hands. "I took him into me. He's asleep inside of me. It doesn't make any sense. It sounds crazy. But... everything else is, too."


<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.

It's not so much a matter of will, with regards to what he knows about Azazel -- barely. It's the fact that what he knows (what little he knows) he's not even technically supposed to know about. Lan's well-meaning, he doesn't think she'll say anything to other people even if he did say but--

But the walls have ears.

He can't say anything. She can't ask.

"From... the sky?" That gets his full attention -- confirms, perhaps, what he's started to suspect.

She counters meanwhile that she might have hallucinated the places she'd seen him, the people she'd seen him around. Loren shakes his head. "Then go there and find out. Then you'll know. ...Right?" A rather direct approach, from a man who prefers to duck and avoid his own demons. "And if all of that was an illusion, then..."

Then.

He's silent after that, listening to her. Trying to set the timing right -- as he's aware of it -- in his head.

She would have first encountered Azazel back... before they met, he thinks. Azazel has been... after Lan for a long time.

He looks over at Lan then, as if to study her, himself.

Took him inside her. 'Asha' might just be an illusion--

He stands up suddenly, rounding towards Lan. "I think I know. I think I know what he's trying to do. Come on--" He reaches for her hands, her wrists suddenly, as if to haul her onto her feet.

But stops, his grip on her wrists slackening.

"...Wait, no, I don't even know if she's in," he says then, taking a step away from her. Both of his hands bury into his hair and he emits a groan of disgruntlement. "Damn it, now what do I do..."

He needs to tell Leah about this as soon as he can.