a good space boy from a good space family (pethdorn) wrote in incompletedata, @ 2018-08-27 17:47:00 |
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Entry tags: | star wars: canon: poe dameron |
Who: Poe Dameron and his very late prompt fill
When: Over the course of the week, leading up to today.
Where: Five Mile Creek ; Cabin 1 ; around.
What: I mean, hopefully not orcs?
Rating: Low
It made him smile, at first; crouched by the creek, his eyes following the sun on the water in an absent exercise of muscle memory embedded over a childhood (and adolescence, and adulthood) of hoping to find a newt to feel wriggle against his palm before he let it slip again, he heard music drifting over the hills. It was a midless reaction, and brief, stemming from whatever piece of him somehow still managed to exist in the world he'd left behind - the part that could still be jolted in moments of distracted reverie by the memory that, no, he was not at home - no, there weren't many benign explanations for mysterious sounds - no, it wasn't some neighbor's speeder, or some tourist walking party, or his father beating on a bucket walking through the furrows. It was only for a moment, but - it did make him smile. Then his mouth settled into a flat, thoughtful line, he drew his fingers through the mud between his boots, and he stood, and shaded his eyes with his hand, and gazed across the meadow, wondering whether there was another population to contend with, here. Someone whose home he was invading. He lost the thread of it, some twenty meters into his exploration. And he decided: it was probably just some other cabin, trying to find a little fun while they still could. He'd keep an ear out. He'd check it out, later. It slipped his mind. Two mornings later, while doling out what was fast becoming deeply unappetizing fare from the cooler he was apparently going to be chained to for the rest of his kriffing time here (it wasn't flattering himself, was it, to think that was a waste? it seemed objectively to be a waste), it floated up to him again, and he realized he head heard it in the intervening time: in sleep, maybe, or in the grey moments that bordered on wakefulness. It had skated beneath his notice, but now it was fully before him, and, what was more, he could practically beat along with it, his fingers drumming in more or less perfect sync with it along the top of the hollow-sounding plastic of the cabin's food supply. It wasn't coming from down by the creek, not this time - or maybe it had been, he thought, as it eluded him again, like a shout batted away on a breeze, and he handed out another damned bag of peanuts. For days now he'd had his ears pricked, waiting for the moment he could pounce on it, half-distracted, never fully present for any task or any conversation lest he lose an opportunity to silence everyone, there, that's it, don't you hear it? Of course no one did - and it was only because he wasn't quick enough, because he couldn't find the right spot, because it kept ebbing back from him even as the words left his mouth, no, shut up, listen. It came so often, now. And people were disappearing. He began to feel, after a night without sleep, that it had replaced them, somehow. It was constant. It wasn't inside of him, but it might as well have been. The sensation that his heart was skipping beats to keep time was only that - a blend of suggestion and fear and the brain's tireless attempts to make connections as desperately as a climber on a cliff tried to connect with a foothold - but if this kept up much longer, it might well break beyond the realm of imagination. Like all things, it meant something, and the unshakable feeling that it meant Steve and Rey (another illusion, maybe, but one he happily indulged, because they were somewhere, and clearly it was up to him to find them, or why else was he haunted by this prototypical incarnation of urgency every minute of every day? It had to mean something; it had to mean that). They needed help. He needed to follow the sound. Only - the sound was everywhere. He went to the creek. This was where it had started. He stared down at the water, which only threw back closed, empty moonlight, and his own bedraggled face. He tried to squint past it, gripped with the conviction that there was another face just under his that he could see if he moved a centimeter this way, a step that way. If he only looked hard enough. He was pretty sure he was supposed to go in. |