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Stray // for John
Things are quiet. Things are cold. This is familiar, and there is no reason to be afraid.
Sometimes Martin knows he's dreaming and it's frustrating, because he can never quite assert control of the circumstances, never make himself fully lucid; he can only ride along the twisting corridors of his wandering imagination, helplessly aware.
Sometimes Martin knows he's dreaming and he doesn't care, because it doesn't matter. The awareness sits unimportant at the back of his head, present but irrelevant. A flavor note. A watermark.
Things are quiet. He stands on the quiet wooden deck of a quiet wooden ship anchored at the center of the quiet empty sea. He doesn't need to see below to know he is alone, he doesn't need to see through the murky dark water to know there is no life in it, and though the knowledge that he is dreaming sits unimportant at the back of his head, that isn't why he knows there is no reason to be afraid.
Things are cold. The wind shudders delicately through his clothes. The salty sea spray wets his face in an impossibly fine mist. The sun does not show here. Fog blankets the world, thick and heavy and dark. He shivers, but he does so at a distance. The cold is part of him. The cold is natural. There is no reason to be afraid.
This is familiar. He knows (because he knows that he is dreaming, surety sat unimportant at the back of his head) that he has dreamed of this quiet ship and this cold sea many times before. He is alone, which is familiar, and there is no reason to be afraid.
He is afraid. He knows he is dreaming, present but irrelevant, and the irrelevance frightens him. That he doesn't care, that he doesn't resist. If this were another kind of dream he would try to make himself swim away, or to change the scenery to something bright and sunny and warm. But he doesn't do those things. He stands there on the deck in the sea and he is so incapable of imagining himself anywhere else that it frightens him. He doesn't want it to be familiar. He doesn't want to feel so calm. He doesn't want to be alone. He doesn't want to be alone.
Wood splinters and cracks and the sea roils beneath the ship. Martin staggers, falls. The shock of it, the shattered quiet, the seething cold, the strange and sudden newness of it all collapsing inward, hits him like a blow to the chest. The ship is coming to pieces; the dream is coming apart. Water rushes in, overtakes him, draws him down, down, down into the murky black abyss.
But drowning is the Buried, and murkiness the Dark, and emptiness the Vast, and finality the End. He does not belong to these. Too Close I Cannot Breathe has had its fun with him, and it makes another grasp as he sinks into its crushing depths, but it has no right to keep him, and it doesn't.
Martin wakes up, or it seems like he does. He knows he is still dreaming, though he's no longer sure he doesn't care. This is familiar, but not like the rest of it. This is only familiar because it happened. It happened yesterday, while he was awake.
He stands, or perhaps is suspended, within a thick, languidly swirling sea of fog. It coils gently around him, fills his lungs. There again, with no language spoken and no words formed, the message roots itself within him: Do not stray.
Martin tries to move. On the ship, movement was possible, though he rarely felt the need. Here, though, the fog weighs him down, heavy and clinging. He isn't being restrained, not exactly, but he feels bound up in it nonetheless. As though the effort of breaking free is too much, not worth the trouble. Easier to let it wrap and curl around him in a protective sheath.
It wants him back. He's been taken somewhere else, somewhere different that it doesn't understand, but it can still reach him, and it wants him. It's nice, isn't it, to be wanted. To be held.
"No," he whispers, so soft it takes a moment to realize he's spoken at all. He hadn't been able to make a sound when this happened on the street, but here - "No," he says again with the little force he can muster. He struggles, and the fog thickens into something that can grip him properly, and when he struggles harder he realizes there is no fog at all, that someone has their arms wrapped around him and has pulled him close.
Greta's cottage is easily recognized. He sees it all in dizzying clarity. He feels the warm, gentle pressure of her arms around him, comforting him for no reason other than he needed it. When he tries to pull away, she lets him, and when he looks at her, she meets his gaze with a querulous expression. Like she wants to ask him what's wrong.
The fog seeps back in, carpeting the floor, rising up around the table. She doesn't seem to see it. It climbs up around her, and still she looks at him with that open, kind, concern. He reaches out, but his hands only sift through mist and smoke. It washes over her until she disappears completely, and when he lunges forward to pull her out, he finds nothing there to grasp. The cottage is gone. She is gone.
"No!" he cries again, panic finally, finally breaking through the veneer of calm indifference. "No, don't, don't-!"
It's too late. It's done. She's gone, and all because she had the audacity to show him kindness, and he had the audacity to receive it.
Do not stray.
"I'm sorry," he sobs, casting about helplessly for any sort of direction even as the fog enfolds him once again. "I'm sorry, I - I didn't-"
His voice grows muffled and distant, swallowed in the impenetrable haze. He shuts his eyes against it all. It doesn't want to hear his excuses, but it isn't punishing him. The Lonely doesn't punish. It comforts. It holds.
He is alone, and that's where he belongs, and it is familiar, and there is no reason to be afraid.
Sometimes Martin knows he's dreaming and it's frustrating, because he can never quite assert control of the circumstances, never make himself fully lucid; he can only ride along the twisting corridors of his wandering imagination, helplessly aware.
Sometimes Martin knows he's dreaming and he doesn't care, because it doesn't matter. The awareness sits unimportant at the back of his head, present but irrelevant. A flavor note. A watermark.
Things are quiet. He stands on the quiet wooden deck of a quiet wooden ship anchored at the center of the quiet empty sea. He doesn't need to see below to know he is alone, he doesn't need to see through the murky dark water to know there is no life in it, and though the knowledge that he is dreaming sits unimportant at the back of his head, that isn't why he knows there is no reason to be afraid.
Things are cold. The wind shudders delicately through his clothes. The salty sea spray wets his face in an impossibly fine mist. The sun does not show here. Fog blankets the world, thick and heavy and dark. He shivers, but he does so at a distance. The cold is part of him. The cold is natural. There is no reason to be afraid.
This is familiar. He knows (because he knows that he is dreaming, surety sat unimportant at the back of his head) that he has dreamed of this quiet ship and this cold sea many times before. He is alone, which is familiar, and there is no reason to be afraid.
He is afraid. He knows he is dreaming, present but irrelevant, and the irrelevance frightens him. That he doesn't care, that he doesn't resist. If this were another kind of dream he would try to make himself swim away, or to change the scenery to something bright and sunny and warm. But he doesn't do those things. He stands there on the deck in the sea and he is so incapable of imagining himself anywhere else that it frightens him. He doesn't want it to be familiar. He doesn't want to feel so calm. He doesn't want to be alone. He doesn't want to be alone.
Wood splinters and cracks and the sea roils beneath the ship. Martin staggers, falls. The shock of it, the shattered quiet, the seething cold, the strange and sudden newness of it all collapsing inward, hits him like a blow to the chest. The ship is coming to pieces; the dream is coming apart. Water rushes in, overtakes him, draws him down, down, down into the murky black abyss.
But drowning is the Buried, and murkiness the Dark, and emptiness the Vast, and finality the End. He does not belong to these. Too Close I Cannot Breathe has had its fun with him, and it makes another grasp as he sinks into its crushing depths, but it has no right to keep him, and it doesn't.
Martin wakes up, or it seems like he does. He knows he is still dreaming, though he's no longer sure he doesn't care. This is familiar, but not like the rest of it. This is only familiar because it happened. It happened yesterday, while he was awake.
He stands, or perhaps is suspended, within a thick, languidly swirling sea of fog. It coils gently around him, fills his lungs. There again, with no language spoken and no words formed, the message roots itself within him: Do not stray.
Martin tries to move. On the ship, movement was possible, though he rarely felt the need. Here, though, the fog weighs him down, heavy and clinging. He isn't being restrained, not exactly, but he feels bound up in it nonetheless. As though the effort of breaking free is too much, not worth the trouble. Easier to let it wrap and curl around him in a protective sheath.
It wants him back. He's been taken somewhere else, somewhere different that it doesn't understand, but it can still reach him, and it wants him. It's nice, isn't it, to be wanted. To be held.
"No," he whispers, so soft it takes a moment to realize he's spoken at all. He hadn't been able to make a sound when this happened on the street, but here - "No," he says again with the little force he can muster. He struggles, and the fog thickens into something that can grip him properly, and when he struggles harder he realizes there is no fog at all, that someone has their arms wrapped around him and has pulled him close.
Greta's cottage is easily recognized. He sees it all in dizzying clarity. He feels the warm, gentle pressure of her arms around him, comforting him for no reason other than he needed it. When he tries to pull away, she lets him, and when he looks at her, she meets his gaze with a querulous expression. Like she wants to ask him what's wrong.
The fog seeps back in, carpeting the floor, rising up around the table. She doesn't seem to see it. It climbs up around her, and still she looks at him with that open, kind, concern. He reaches out, but his hands only sift through mist and smoke. It washes over her until she disappears completely, and when he lunges forward to pull her out, he finds nothing there to grasp. The cottage is gone. She is gone.
"No!" he cries again, panic finally, finally breaking through the veneer of calm indifference. "No, don't, don't-!"
It's too late. It's done. She's gone, and all because she had the audacity to show him kindness, and he had the audacity to receive it.
Do not stray.
"I'm sorry," he sobs, casting about helplessly for any sort of direction even as the fog enfolds him once again. "I'm sorry, I - I didn't-"
His voice grows muffled and distant, swallowed in the impenetrable haze. He shuts his eyes against it all. It doesn't want to hear his excuses, but it isn't punishing him. The Lonely doesn't punish. It comforts. It holds.
He is alone, and that's where he belongs, and it is familiar, and there is no reason to be afraid.
no subject
The fog initially puzzles him. He is there to observe, but there is little to see. Just a subtly shifting mantle, smokey and pearlescent grey. It closes in on him, holds him, and he knows but does not share the dreamer's distress.
Where are they? Why can't he See them?
The Archivist turns his head like a compass needle, orienting himself in this place-that-isn't-a-place, until he finds the dream's true north.
There.
He moves without moving, and a shape appears, blurred by the fog. The dreamer, casting about for whatever they've lost. The Archivist remains silent; it has never been for him to interfere. He is only a visitor. But he watches, and hears the muffled, "I'm sorry," and feels the faintest twinge of unease.
no subject
When the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, it isn't because of the cold that suffuses him, which never feels unnatural here. This is something else, something that is also familiar and yet made difficult to place by the distracting certainty that it doesn't belong here. The fog seems to breathe around him, expanding and then tightening like it wants to prove its possession of him, which implies an audience, and it's with an uncomfortable lurch in his gut that Martin remembers the sensation, something to which he'd once been so very accustomed: the sensation of being Watched.
It is then that he catches sight of something else. A figure looming dark and impossible within the relentlessly shifting fog, shadowed but undeniably staring, seeing, Looking at him. There's a flash of light as something blinks - too many somethings, distortions of light shining through the haze, circling and illuminating this figure like a proper angelic halo: too many eyes and incomprehensible. Martin tries to recoil from the abject horror of it, the sickening awareness that it sees him and knows intimately how alone he is, and that it doesn't care.
And then there is recognition. The fog clings to him, still anxiously twining, and Martin stares back at John. His eyes are far too bright, too wide, too open, but it is John, or the thing that lives in John, and Martin knows with intense, agonizing clarity that he has not conjured a facsimile of John here into his dream. This is John.
"No," he moans softly, and the fog rushes to surround him. He tenses, but it doesn't matter, not really. There is no hiding him now.
no subject
It doesn't surprise him, but it makes him uneasy.
The Archivist doesn't feel uneasy. He doesn't feel anything; he only observes, sees, knows. But there is an intense dislike, a revulsion of the fog that does not belong to the dreamer, and does not belong to the Archivist. He does not know where it comes from, but he knows it is there. He lifts one hand, slow and experimental, and pushes it forward. He watches the fog recoil, and somewhere, there is satisfaction. Good.
no subject
It's difficult to speak; his voice is so muffled by the thick, wet air that he can barely hear it himself, and every time he opens his mouth it flows back into him, spreading its icy numbing emptiness through him. But as Martin stares back at the thing that isn't John, the thing that watches with such horrible impassivity, he cannot help but try.
"Go away," he says, quiet and hopeless. "Please, John, just go away."
The fog shudders again, this time with something he might be pressed to describe as affection, and it seethes over him gently, endeavoring to cover him up against the unwelcome eyes.
no subject
But this one does more than try. This one speaks. This one... requests.
This one calls him John.
The Archivist blinks. Somewhere, there is a stringent, stubborn denial of the dreamer's request. It is not the Archivist's own; he stays because he is here, because no one calls him elsewhere. Because it is unfinished. Somewhere, a voice that is not a voice growls, so end it, then.
He steps forward, his hand still outstretched. The fog twists and writhes away from him, closing around the dreamer, thickening into something that wants to be impenetrable. But the Archivist does not believe it to be so, and he continues reaching, watching in thoughtless fascination as his fingers brush the dreamer's sleeve.
He knows the dreamer's name. He has always known it, but it has been an extraneous detail, far less important than the numbing fog, the fear and isolation, buried deep. Now, it rises in him like a revelation: Martin. He does not know if he speaks the name, or if the knowledge of it peals out so strongly that it cuts through the fog, regardless.
This is Martin, and somewhere, that matters. Somewhere, that is the most important detail.
no subject
When fingers brush at the crook of his elbow, it doesn't matter how light or fleeting they feel; the contact is so abruptly real that it sends a jolt of horror through him. He recoils, but there's nowhere to go, caught within the impossible boundaries of his own solitude. And then there's something... else. It isn't a voice, and it isn't the voiceless warning of the Lonely, either. It doesn't have a shape, but he knows it is for him, to him. It reverberates through him, and the fog clears enough that he can see John standing there, terrifyingly close, eyes piercing and intense and awful, his fingers still resting at the edge of his arm.
"John," he says in an unthinking reply, his voice trembling, and he's no longer certain whether he wants to push him away or cling onto him.
The weighted stillness breaks. The fog whips around him with the sudden frenzy and ferocity of a storm, lashing at his arms, his legs, his throat, proving that when it wants to, it can exert tangible force. Martin jerks back helplessly, pulled from John's fingers and out of reach, and the fog sweeps in around John with the same terrible fury. Martin can feel its intentions as though they are, in some way, his own: This is its domain, and no prying eyes or grasping hands are welcome here. It means to swallow John into nothing, just as it did Greta.
"No!" Martin screams, harsh enough to hurt his throat, though he can barely hear himself against the rush in his ears. He struggles, but it drags him inexorably, irresistibly back. "No, John - John!"
no subject
But he no longer sees Martin. Somewhere, that is horrible. Somewhere, it needs to be rectified immediately.
The Archivist agrees. He is here to watch the dreamer, and he will not be denied his purpose by the arrogant machinations of the environment. He will have what he is owed. Even the dreamer understands. Even he calls out against this unjust separation.
The Archivist forgets the rest of his body and Looks. He Looks with eyes that are unbothered by inconsequential factors like wind or damp. They wheel around him in a frenzied orbit, piercing through the chaos of this manufactured storm until they find what he is looking for: the dreamer, Martin, struggling against the force of the gale. The Archivist Sees him, and the Archivist has him, remembering his hands to grip Martin's shoulders, remembering his arms to pull him in, remembering a body tall enough to hunch over and shield him from the storm, reconstituting himself into a rock, an anchor, a harbor.
This is not what the Archivist does.
John blinks, and draws in a shuddering breath, his chest pressing against the person that he's unthinkingly clutching to him, arms aching with the effort. He has just enough time to look down at a familiar head of wind-tossed hair, to blurt, "I--Martin?"
And then he's gone.
no subject
Martin feels himself surrendering by degrees, losing the will to fight against the bitter wind that holds him fast, the smothering despair that threatens to drown him; maybe he falls to his knees, maybe it's more metaphysical than that. It doesn't really matter if there's no one here to see.
When the world rips apart, it's not like it was before, the sinking ship, the devouring sea. This time it does not collapse inward, but is breached from without. Martin sees - he doesn't understand what he sees. A swirling display of impossible celestial bodies, each one an eye, unraveling and exploding outward from a singular point of orbit. The point originates from everywhere; this is impossible, but that's what it does. The eyes are looking everywhere, in every direction at once; this, too, is impossible, and yet. They seek and search until, in harmonious unison, they find him. They surround him, pushing back the storm, and as the fog drains rapidly out of him, a pent up scream escapes along with it.
There are slender hands upon him, long-fingered and delicate, drawing him in; arms that enfold him, fitting close against his back; a looming body that curls over him in a protective embrace. The wind, the fog, the oceanic squall, it remains, raging, trying to reach him, but he can feel it break upon the back of the body that holds him, anchoring him here to this lighthouse of a man.
Huddled against a narrow chest, Martin looks up, blinking away mist and salt-spray like he's emerging from darkness into light, though there is little light here. John looks down at him. John looks down at him. He speaks, bewildered, human, and Martin has no time to panic or recoil or have any idea what to do with his hands before John vanishes as abruptly as he'd come.
The storm settles. The fog encroaches. Martin does fall this time, crumpling softly to his knees on the quiet deck of a wooden ship in a cold, familiar sea. The fog curls back over him, reproachful and weak, an animal licking its wounds. It holds him, it comforts. It reaches into his heart and tries to tell him he's been abandoned. The sentiment rings hollow; Martin knows better than that. But he also knows it doesn't matter. It's better this way. There is no reason to be afraid.