eswareinmal | (no subject)

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(no subject)

Characters: Shin and anyone asleep
Open? Yep!
Where: the Dreaming
When: Nighttime, RD12
What: Shin goes dream walking.
Warnings: Lots of capitalized Ds

Even in Dreams, Shin was restless. Without the normal background hum of hundreds of Dreamers, the Dreaming felt empty. Hollow.

Far to much like it had when his Dreaming had been sealed.

There were still the doors to the dreams of everyone who was asleep, even if so many of them seemed like cardboard cut outs... It was easy to spot the ones of those who weren't native of the world. They were more real, solid, and he could feel more clearly who was behind them. It was something he had noticed before, back home. The doors to fellow Dreamers were the more vibrant and real, and those who had strong powers were a close second. Idly he drifted through the insubstantial hallway, knocking on some to announce his presence, others just phasing into the dream and looking around. After all, it wasn't as if he expected most people to hear him knocking. They'd have to be aware for that, and he knew for a fact that there were no other Dreamers around and active dreamers were rare.

[[OoC: Feel free to notice Shin entering your characters dream, or to just set up a random dream for him to step into!

Edit: Also, since Shin power allows him to manipulate dreams, let me know if you don't want him to be able to with your character's dream, please!]]

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Everything is burning.

The colors are inverted red and gray and white. The moon is unforgiving. There's something wrong about the smell of the smoke, but it's too thick to see the source.

He steps over glowing coal remnants of wood and dirt, following the smoke. Underneath his foot, a charred plank cracks, falls apart; his family crest is split down the middle before it breaks into pieces.

"You're a failure."

He whips his head to the left and looks down at the child, himself, seven or eight and cruelly smiling. The nasty twist is out of place on his soft features, still full with baby fat.

"How could you let this happen?"

To the right, it's The Avenger, taller and stronger and prouder even at twelve, dressed in his old black jumpsuit and radiating anger so strongly that a beam next to him explodes in fire. Sasuke tries to put his arms up to shield his face from the shower of sparks, but he can't move.

It burns.

"You failed them." His child-self points and the smoke clears, revealing the source--what looks like a hill, a pile of old clothes. Sasuke steps closer.

His mother, eyes wide and unseeing, is at the top of the pile, her body stiff and unnatural. His family's corpses, hundreds of them, are stacked and burning.

The smoke tastes like spoiled, charred meat.

Sasuke gags and falls to his knees, and his hands splash in hot, sticky black fluid. Blood, pooling from their bodies, seeping close to him, staining his clothes.

He tries to back away, but he can't move. The child laughs and The Avenger grabs Sasuke's hair.

"You'll never be clean," he growls, and shoves Sasuke's face into the blood. It's halfway up to his elbows, now.

"That's enough."

There's a ripple as Shin steps into the nightmare, the fabric of it warping around him, turning everything still and silent like a photo. He looks different than he does waking. His hair is white, his posture straight and there's no sign of weakness or injury. This is his realm, where he's at his most powerful and he's not hiding it.

Part of him wants to make a side comment about wallowing in self pity, but he pushes it aside. People couldn't help what they dreamed unless they were Dreamers.

Though is Sasuke's mind held fast to his nightmare and didn't break free of it, he might.

Free from The Avenger's grasp, Sasuke collapses onto his side, trembling. He can feel the terror clawing at his chest, but without the sensation of bile at the back of his throat or the dizziness of hyperventilation.

It's eerily still in his dreamscape, but he recognizes the voice.

His head turns when he tells it to, this time.

"What are you doing here?" His voice is raw, pained. While he'll take the blessing of his mental self-torment receding, even a little, it still reads as wrong.

"Putting out a nightmare," Shin replied offhandedly. "Too many of them to let them run rampant."

He surveys the mess of the dream before pushing it back, willing it to fade even further away.

"You're wasting your time."

Sasuke forces himself to sit, and it feels like he's carrying the weight of every member of his family on his back. It feels good to be free of the cloying darkness, but there's still a stirring of guilt deep in his stomach. "I can take worse. You should focus on someone who isn't used to them."

"You say as if you want to be stuck in that," Shin snorted. "I don't need to focus and yours is the worst right now. Unless you want to wallow but after your speech earlier, I'd thin you'd be glad to break out of it."

Petty? Yep.

"Besides. Most people are used to them. The ones that aren't don't get many so it doesn't matter."

"I suffer at night so it doesn't haunt me when I'm awake," Sasuke muttered. He ignored the obvious jab, hugging his knees to his chest.

A look up at Shin--standing tall and strong and bright above him. Sasuke felt small; weak; childish. He couldn't call up enough energy to hate it. "It's my penance. The nightmares will stop when I avenge the ghosts of my family."

They would.

And if they didn't, he'd put himself to a dreamless, permanent sleep.

Shin raised an eyebrow. "... you know that's not how nightmares work, right?" He was pretty sure that wasn't how family ghosts worked either. As far as he knew his family ghost just followed him around making faces at him or something like that. He'd never actually gone and asked either of the two who could see her what she was actually doing....

"That's how mine work." Sasuke wrapped his arms tighter around his legs, holding onto his wrists...still thin. His thumbs traced over the places where he had burned seals onto his skin. "I'm the only one who can avenge them, and I haven't done it...so they're restless. They want Konoha to pay for its crimes. And I'm the only one who can collect."

If Shin watched, he would be able to see Sasuke rocking, very, very slowly. His stare was fixed at an unknown spot in the distance, eyes glazed.

"They'll go to sleep once I kill the wretched sacks of bones who signed their death sentence," he continued, more to himself than to Shin. Almost under his breath. "They have to. They won't have any reason to keep haunting me."

Edited 2012-07-28 04:20 (UTC)

"...Riiiiight..." Shin eyed Sasuke warily. "...and they came with you. To another world. Where you can't do anything about what ever the heck they're on about anyway."

Shin had been to enough therapists in his life to know almost exactly what everyone one of them would have said about this situation. Survivor’s guilt was a bitch he knew quite well...

"I'm going to have to do this every night, huh?"

Sasuke narrowed his eyes. Shin was looking at him like he was mad, like the soldiers who returned from war screaming hallucinations.

He supposed he could see the resemblance, from the outside, but Shin didn't understand. It was different.

"Of course. They haunt me, not the location. And the dead don't care much about traveling the astral plane." He chewed on the inside of his mouth and looked away, at the same spot in the distance again. "You could just leave me alone to do my penance, but I'm guessing that's not in the list of available options."

Shin snorted a single laugh. "And you have the audacity to lecture me about wallowing..." he shook his head. "Unless you have a specific hour requirement, no, it's not on the list."

Not after the speech Sasuke had given him earlier.

"If you can tell me how long I've been dreaming," Sasuke said, staring humorlessly at Shin above him. The mocking made his hands shake, itch to wrap around his throat, but-- no. Not here. It wouldn't do anything anyway. "The human brain requires ninety to a hundred twenty minutes of rapid eye-movement sleep per cycle. Once I'm finished with that, I'll rest dreamlessly and be functional tomorrow."

He bit on his lip, grinning around his teeth. "Unless you want to see me when I'm cranky."

Shin's eyes grew distant a moment. "40 minutes," he answered before looking over. "Though somehow I doubt ghosts keep a count...." he added dryly. "There's plenty other things you can dream about. Hell, you can even just float around here in nothingness if you really want. It all counts the same."

"You say that as though I'm an active participant."

Sasuke lay back, just to test the environment. It wasn't comfortable, nor did it hurt--nothing. Pure nothingness. He wondered if this was how it felt to be dead.

"They'll hurt me tomorrow if I don't get it done tonight," he added.

"If you have the same nightmare every night, doesn't much matter now does it?" Shin countered. "But by all means, if you want to just have your cross, far be it for me to talk you out of it."

"Different nightmares every night since they died," Sasuke corrected, flatly. "My family is intelligent. Creative. They wouldn't be so repetitive and boring."

He thought, somewhere, that he could hear the voices of his parents and grandparents approving.

"And apparently bitter as hell and giving no shits about your well being," Shin added dryly. "And utterly insecure if they think they need to torture you to get them to do shit for them from the afterlife. Some family."

Sasuke's blood froze with fury.

"Don't insult them," he said, voice quiet, toneless--dangerous. "Don't you fucking say SHIT about my family!"

He stood up, hands shaking, eyes wild. "My family was massacred and I can't do them the courtesy of putting them at rest--nine years I've been failing them, over and over, and you call them bitter--?"

He was aware that he was screaming. Didn't give a shit. He wanted to lunge, to choke the life out of the worm, the filth spitting on the Uchiha name.

Shin floated back, eye's widening a little at the sudden rage. "...Bitter's pretty accurate..." he replied, tone a bit slow. "That's kinda what happens when people get frustrated that long, calm down..."

Nine years of tormenting himself over that... no wonder that guy was so twitchy....

"I WILL NOT CALM DOWN."

His chest was heaving--images of his old teachers and teammates telling him the same things flitted through his head, and he was sick and fucking tired of sitting down and shutting up and trying to be the bigger person.

It hurt. And no one seemed to understand how much, how deep it ran.

The fury that boiled through him felt like an accumulation of all of it, built up from every moment in his life he'd tried to push it away. And he lunged with a howl.

Oh shi--

Shin floated back, becoming insubstantial so that Sasuke would go right through him.

...Crap. How unstable was this jerk? He couldn't just leave things like this, think, how could he--

Maybe.

He reached out into the dream, pulling into existence something to take the appearance of what Sasuke wanted to vent his rage on. Sasuke's mind would fill in the details and let him do what he willed with the figure, whatever it would be.

...as long as it wasn't him.

Sasuke's fist slammed into a familiar fabric.

He looked up, and into a glassless mirror.

The body was pathetic. Thin, bony, haggard--and the emotion, the rage and fear on his face, was like a spoiled child.

Worthless.

"Worthless piece of--"

He went for it--delivered punch to his other self's gut hard enough for his knuckles to smart and warm blood to spatter onto his own shoulder. It was sickeningly satisfying.

He grabbed the clone's hair and smashed his forehead against its nose, feeling the cartilage splinter and more blood pour down his face. After that, it was mindless--clawing, kicking, whaling on himself with increasing fury.

At some point, the howls of rage turned wet. Tears made tracks through the blood, his own and the other's, unnaturally bright red and smeared on his face.

Wrapped in his dream, he had forgotten Shin's presence.

The other teen could do nothing but stare, rather disturbed by the whole scene.

That... hadn't.. at all been what he had expected to happen. Had he just made things worse...? He couldn't even tell.

With a gentle gesture, he made the blood and increasing gore fade, leaving nothing but darkness again, trying to lull Sasuke into a deeper, true sleep.

The apparition faded, slowly, like dissipating fog.

Without the force of the fight to hold him up anymore, he sank to his knees, pressing his now-clean hands to his face. His body shook with silent sobbing, and it felt like each one pulled a little more energy from him.

It was cathartic, in a way. Restful. Darkness wrapped itself around him like a soft, heavy blanket, pulling him towards silence.

He let it come.

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yumemi_no_ou - 2012-07-30 03:53 (UTC) - Expand

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