Topic: Close my eyes: Unleash my mind?

Toby Aradam

Date: 2013-05-06 03:35 EST
AoifeDuggan's player! ]

It was one of those quiet nights.

The wind didn't rustle the curtains hanging in front of his sliding glass door. He could just barely hear the television downstairs. Sher wasn't gaming or watching anything. He laid the opposite way on his bed, his head at the foot, one arm wrapped around a pillow. In his other hand, he held a bracelet.

It wasn't something Mayu would wear, she liked the ones that glowed, that made noise when she moved. This seemed quiet, a little worn. He twirls the bracelet around his index finger. Somehow he couldn't imagine Aoife wearing it either. Maybe it wasn't even hers. But he'd been holding onto it just to ask her anyway.

He stayed like that, with his cheek resting on the pillow, moonlight splashing into his room and turning everything a cool, crystalline blue. After a while, he exhales, his eyes drooping. His long fingers rested in a loose curl around the bracelet in his hand.

She didn't sleep much, hardly at all. Time had been kind as of late and she'd been spending it well and careful. Winter was melting away into Spring, leaving longer days and shorter nights. The nights were always the worst, always. On this particular one, the wind was silent and the stars stayed hidden behind wispy clouds keeping secrets and stories to themselves. Our Dreamwalker was curled up in a chair watching the dying flames of a fire fight for the very last breath of air. She'd only planned on staying in town for a weekend, but she couldn't leave without that bracelet. She'd left it somewhere, lost it. Then, the whispers had started.

She hated them. Hated them. But is weren't those that called her name, but anothers. One, two, three blinks later and her eyes slipped shut.

The fire was there to catch her last breath and the name that was hidden inside of it.

His dreams began like they always did. Suddenly, abruptly, surprisingly.

Where there was darkness, there was suddenly light. But gentle light. The light of early morning, coming in through a window. His limbs heavy with fatigue, his head not wanting to turn, his eyes refusing to open.

"Toby?" He hears his name at the door, but his mouth can't open to respond. And then she's next to him. Looking at him. Watching him.

Her bright green eyes catch and reflect every bit of light, shining around long, horizontal rectangular pupils.

Hair spills like forest green water around her.

His chest constricts. He sits up and still he cannot speak her name.

...where there was darkness, there was suddenly light...one, two, three blinks later. Dawn fractured through the window and onto the floor where it shattered into a thousand pieces of dream. Her back was pressed into a wall, one shoulder nearest the frame of the only thing that ever seemed to keep her grounded. She breathed in carefully and out just the same. There was a girl, there was a boy, and there was a bed. This...could go in many directions.

She didn't move, but she was somehow atop him. One thin leg on either side of his hips, her warmth over the hidden waist of his cotton pants.

Warmth suffuses him.

Need grips him.

His fingertips sing with electricity, his heartbeat racing until he can feel it in his face and it hurts.

Her arms around him, her face in his neck. Her hair all around him like a silk woven sheet.

This can't be real. I must be dreaming.

As soon as he moves his arms to hold her to him, she vanishes. As does he. The room is plunged once more into darkness.

And then it went there. Aoife looked away into the nothing that was a corner where dust and forgotten promises were swept for safe keeping. Sounds were muffled as if they were made underwater never fully reaching an understanding with the here and now. The air shifted with his heartbeat, thickening with what he always hid beneath the surface. But before she could close her eyes to block it out, the scene fell into black.

He breathes. Ragged, difficult. His hand presses to his chest, his other winding through his hair.

How could that happen again? Couldn't he have her in his dreams? Where the only one who'd know was him?

Thoughts blink by like scenes on a projector.

Mouths locked, fingers caught in clothing, breaths exhaled against flesh.

A steady motion, back and forth.

The supple curve of a hip beneath his gripping hand. The tensing of muscles as...

Thunder cracks in the dark and when he looks down, a hand is gripping his neck. His feet lift off the ground. His surroundings begin to glow with a feral yellow and blue light.

The support of the figmented wall disappeared leaving her in the middle of his desires, his wants, his aching need. Flashes of light, want to be memories. Each one a picture painted in smeared colors, blurred at the edges with uncertainty. The louder than boom noise had her flinching in the direction of a shadow. It lifted from the ginger haired boy, bathing him and the hand about his neck in a misty glow.

"Toby.." she breathed his name on a chance that no one was listening and took a step forward.

"Opes." The word reverberates over itself five times. As do the words that follow. "Now it makes sense."

All he can do is choke. And grab at the wrist of the hand that holds him. A boy merely half the size of himself holds him up with ridiculous strength. His white hair like a forest of ice, turquoise eyes narrowed.

"You are a thing. You are not a person, or even something worth grieving over should you die during this..exercise."

Darkness had a way of playing tricks on the eyes. These kinds of tricks were the ones the Dreaming ate and gave back twisted into horrible nightmares. Nothing made sense, but why would it? It was nothing but a playground to some. The step she'd taken was just one, another would have brought her from the shadows and into the unknown of notice.

risk...risk...risk..

All at once the hand around his neck disappears. He falls to the black ground in a heap, then pitches over, scuttling backward like a crab, his wide eyes up and pinned on the adversary above him.

I have to run. I have to get up, I have to run!

But he couldn't.

Even as the boy pulls the sword from the scabbard on his back. Even as lightning flashes overhead, catching on the sharp edge of the blade.

"You will die. Here. Just as you died. Before. Your life was over from the day you were born."

From over the boy's shoulder a vicious eruption of Hellfire shines and explodes toward the both of them. Fiery blond hair ripples wildly through the air, the figure on all fours. It reaches, it rips, it howls.

It bypasses the boy and sinks its right arm into Toby?s chest.

Toby Aradam

Date: 2013-05-06 03:40 EST
Movement flickered like stills of a film reel, broken transitions and static edges. Toby fell, the boy pulled a sword, and a thing the color of white hot flame leaped from somewhere that was nowhere and was all over at once. It was as real as memories went, so much that the strike of lightening left heat behind and the entire frame of dream shook. More steps and she reached.

He breathes. Ragged and difficult.

Like he's just broken the surface of a body of water. Coughing, wheezing, panting. His hands claw at his chest where nothing sticks out of it. Where there's no hole, no wound to show that that fiery being had plunged its entire arm through him.

The air is filled with the sound of his breathing.

Then something touches him. On his left. He grunts, rolls over, and faces whatever it is from a crouch. Rivulets of sweat run down his face, his eyes are so wide they hurt. Great, swimming pools of aquamarine with a thick layer of ice.

And just as quickly as everything had manifested, it was gone leaving Aoife and Toby alone. It was a face off low to the ground as she'd matched his crouch. Her eyes were just as big and just as bright, frost on a window on a cloudless day. "I wouldnae be here if I were you." The stain of evil had been left behind, slowly consuming the darkness around them.

What are you doing here?

That's what he wanted to say, that's what he thought he'd said. But the more he tried, the more his mouth stayed glued shut. His lips trembled, his jaw tightened, his entire body quivered. He throws frantic looks all around, then claws himself up to his feet.

They say the eyes are the window to the soul, between the two of them one could fall forever. She was slower to stand, keeping pace with the movement of black and the beat of light that pulsed on them. "Have you anywhere else less..." her words seemed unfit in this place, their echoes like hollow moans.

No. I don't know where I am. I know I'm dreaming. I want to wake up.

The words come not from his mouth that has yet to open but from all around them. He turns on his heel and runs into someone else.

Their body is hard, unrelenting, and he stumbles backward with a grunt. Ginger hair lays shaggy over a deadly, sharp expression. Eyes glitter fiercely beneath a scowl. The figure's thin mouth is as hard as a rock. He looks up at his own irritated face, past and present meshed together in one location.

Around them all, from the ground up, white yellow light begins to shine. Beneath their feet, grass. A breeze blows, bringing with it a hint of spring and rain.

You, I know you. What are you doing here?!

"You did it." The figure finally speaks. Then it looks up at Aoife.

She didn't follow the direction of the voices and words. The weight of her gaze remained on Toby. Waiting. It gave her enough time to react and reach out to catch his back when he stumbled after running into...himself? She breathed with the breeze that sent the grass dancing and replied over the shoulder of the dreamer, "No. You did."

"You made the mistake.. Now you're in trouble.."

I don't get what you mean. I didn't do anything wrong, I?"I DIDN'T DO ANYTHING!!"

His voice finally rips free of his mouth like a river breaking free of its damn. He lurches forward and shoves both of his hands into the figure's chest. The taller Toby stumbles backward, staring at the smaller one like he had just appeared from thin air.

"I didn't do anything. I didn't want your life. You had to go and die for her and left me to pick up the pieces! I can't stand you."
Pieces of sense fell into place just when he stepped away, leaving her hands up in the air supporting nothing and everything at once. Little fingers curled into her palms and her arms fell to her sides once more, flimsy fabric slipping back over the scars which marked time and place and all the things she hated. "Would you go back?" She asked him, asked them. The grass bent and swayed just as the first few drops of rain fell like tears.

The figure's thin lips twist into a smile that's as hollow as a rotted tree. There's holes in the expression, it's no more real than the dream they were all a part of.

"I don't need to go back.. I never left.."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"Fix it."

"Fix what?"

The figure vanishes and when next he opens his eyes, Toby is staring up at the ceiling of his own bedroom. He lifts one hand, but sees a white claw instead, bestial like a gargoyle's with wicked sharp talons and red streaks back along his bleached skin.

Green melted into hardwood, the sky into a ceiling, and the forever of time into walls. Again, there was a bed but this time he was alone, staring up at a grotesque deformity of what was once his hand. This couldn't possibly go well. Before he realized it, she lurched from her spot, springing free of the roots that had covered her feet and landed on his bed. Sheets gave way as she slid and her palms slapped into his shoulder and arm. "Not now...wake up."

Her hands were cool, soft and calloused, and much too real for a dream to handle. The edges started to flicker like a light needing change, static from a channel lost in a storm...

"My hand..what's wrong with my hand?"

The body he looks down on isn't his own, a grotesque monstrosity of muscle under white bone, crimson markings in spirals and rivers flowing over him. His voice echoes with the duality of someone else, something snake-like and thin.

Then that girl is there, her hands are on him and their coolness feels like a lightning shock. He bucks up from the bed, a scream catching in his throat.

And he wakes up.

His body lurches off the edge of the bed and he lands in a sprawl of arms and legs and pillow. He lays there for a second, blinking. Then he sighs.

It wasn't just any sigh for with it came the remnants of a dream. Fragments of memories rained down, melting on his skin like fallen snow. Cool kisses that spread into something warm. He wouldn't forget.

Somewhere else in a room with a fire that had long since withered to sunset embers, someone else sighed the same way, remembering to breathe.