Repose

[Separate locks.]

Hey.

Who: Cisco, and the Queen of America
What: Demotion
Where: The Wolves' Trailer Park
When: Last night
Warnings/Rating: PG

( Read more... )

[Julia L.]

Hi. Still in town?

[F. Eames]

I missed a message. Sorry about that.

[Dahlia]

How are you, Dahlia?

[PJ.]

Hello.

[Ring..]

[Claire J.]

You like creepy religion stuff right? I need help with a creepy religion thing.

[Public]

Anyone need a roommate? I can't live above this shitty flower shop anymore. It smells like bad life choices.

[Public]

Was the princess everything you ever hoped for?

[Tim D]

Don't even try to tell me you didn't go.

[Cisco D]

Spill.

[Public]

All the people I'm trying to find are lipstick colors. Red and a murderess, and blue lipstick and a movie theater, darling. Who are you?

[Cisco D]

Did you spend an evening spellbound by books, darling?

[Janus A]

Which you went into the books?

[Sam M]

I'm indulging myself, did you jump into a history of Picasso or Van Gogh and spend an evening in splotches?

[News: The Gym & Woods]
[After being closed and extremely vacant for months, light begins to appear regularly in the old roadhouse. A familiar bike is spotted parked outside. A few days later, the gym re-opens to the public without fanfare, or even an announcement 'bout it. Aside from an very limited class schedule in the evenings, business is—per usual—quiet. The owner is otherwise scarce. The help wanted sign on the door remains.

Deeper in the woods, the trailer on pack territory has been empty ever since shit went haywire. It remains that way for the time being.]

[Separately: Newt P, Jack P, Steve M, Cat C, Pat G, Destiny S, Marta F, Cisco D]
[Going through missed messages. Figures she should say something, but doesn't really know what to say.]

hey

[Locked to Cisco D]

Went rogue during the chaos. Sorry, brother. Any idea what caused the first round of shit?

Eames was dog-tired, darling. The kind of weary dog that trotted for miles to get itself home, which was pathetic and not remotely affecting. It shouldn't have been tremendously hard work. It was after all just one sort of dream, one with a set beginning and an ending. The clinic had baked that up and presented it to the dreamers with the faint surprise of someone expecting praise, colored with a taste of the accusing in its absence. It was the sort of thing only a non-dreamer could decide was less work, darling. Of course it sounded simpler. Plug everyone in, until they were under, a tour around the Capital with a dozen sleeping dreamers and trot out the same fairytale dream that lulled them into contentment.

What wasn't considered was how all those minds - at once, darling - interacted with the set-up. You had dreamers whose sub-conscious was as light and fluffy as fresh-whipped cream and you had those whose minds were a roiling sea, murky with all the bones of memories that could get dragged up. And the dream had to remain somewhat separate, so that the dreamer's mind didn't thrust itself out of the dream entirely. The concoction in the tubes did that to some degree, which is why they were plugged in. But a dreamer who woke, having been kept under was bad for business. The dreamers from the clinic were expected to sustain it. It was like building a structure intended to survive twelve people pulling it apart, out of meringue, light and substantial and easily crushed.

And of course, darling, the dreams were only short. So they did it over and over again, until one dreamer after another sloped off, looking not green but faintly gray like all that was left of them was sinew and bone and all the marrow had been sucked out with the hiss and pump of the patented devices. Eames didn't know the experience of everyone who worked in the clinic. They were kept separately and while their paths could cross, it was inconvenient much of the time which was calculated by the men in suits. He didn't know if everyone had previously dreamed over and over, sustained periods of dreaming that meant you woke thickly, with the sour taste of sleep on your tongue just long enough to drink, to look blearily about you and to slide back under again. If it had been the real world, darling, he would have shuddered at the prospect of dreaming so unguarded, out in the open and so frequently.

But he was done for the day. Awake clung to him greasily, as if it couldn't get a grasp, and Eames sat in the chair beside the check-point for loading up buses with his elbows on his knees and leaning forward until the thick muscle of his back was a curve and his head was a pendulum weight over his knees from the base of his neck. He would stand, in a little bit. It wasn't impossible, he just wasn't trying yet (and he'd defend it as such until his dying breath). He wore unobtrusive clothes, all black: black pants that fitted well and a black shirt and a black reefer coat, none of which looked much like Eames and all of which didn't do much to help the faintly grayish cast to normally florid skin.

In a moment, he pushed himself up from the chair by its arms with a grunt of effort he was embarrassed to have to expend, and he didn't stagger but took three steps and then leaned against the wall nearest that didn't belong to the clinic, or the temporary outlet it had set up.

If it continues this temperature I may need to get a warmer jacket.

[Hannah S.]

I thought you would like to know that you were right.

[It's on her way back into town after spending the days immediately after wiping out the electrical supply closest to the woods, in the palatial place in the Capital where the din is deadened just a little. She's in the back seat of the car, expensive and black and purring with luxury, swaddled in a coat that would buy her old neighborhood beer for a month. The phone is small and cheap. She picked it up at an unrecognizable big box store, one of many and she transferred the number over. Now, with the air changing outside from the milling traffic of the city to the road out of town, she rings.]

Ring

[The connection of Pack, for werewolves, is a powerful thing. It's possible to be ignored, though difficult depending on the strength of the bond others may share nearby, and it is possible to be broken (not snapped, but splintering like a frayed cord). This flood of mismatched memories has sent some wolves into an uncertain haze, not breaking the tie but stretching it to the limit as Those Who Do Not Remember wander away, to the Capital and beyond. Some pack members remember vendettas since dropped, or pick up bitter enmity that never existed to begin with, making the bond hurt, like red pepper.

The bond is further taxed by a thoughtless fear of another predator come to the fore; a hunter prowling around the edges of the Pack. The wolves are not used to being low on the food chain. They are the pinnacle and bone react well to this feeling. Some just run. Others attack anything that comes near. A few change without the pressure of the moon, causing more distress and chaos to ripple through the bond.

Such things have been known to make entire Packs go wild. Turn on each other, perhaps, driven by anger or instinct. The trailers in the woods and associated camp has become a dangerous place to be.

In the center of it, the Repose pack alpha tries to stay sane, and keep his Pack sane too. It is an astonishingly difficult task. Naturally dominant and reassuring command an alpha may possess, but this is like many tiny meathooks pulling that draw apart. Cisco's mental presence has, up until this point, been a solid rock. As his strength begins to wane, that center point of reassurance begins to fade.

Even as the moon wanes too, its power seems to grow stronger. ]

[Patrick G.]

Charming?

[Cisco D]

Let me know if you need help.

[Public]

We've closed some roads and trails at the park. Come to the ranger station for an updated map.

[Public, anon]

Whoever the hell is Alpha here, we need to talk.

[Locked to Cisco D]
[During this.]

Dude, you got problems.

[Public]

After the little letters episode, I wonder who the most notorious town resident might have been and what they would do to make their fame. But most people here seem to be transplants. What would you go down in town infamy for, darlings?

[Patrick G]

Ready to get me injured in a snowmobile accident?

[Public]

Anyone like ice fishing?

[On Sunday morning first light, the truck is gone. It's not just gone. There's a small, potted tree sitting where the car was parked. It has a cheerful-looking star on top and is decorated with string-lights in the shape of peppers and some obnoxiously bright baubles in various shades of screamingly loud colors. The string-lights flash and the note perched in the branches says 'temporarily without a ride? Call [Number]'. In the wide-open time between Sunday morning and Sunday evening, the truck is worked over. There's a mechanic who pays attention to every rust-spot and who gives the tires a changeover as well. By the time it's parked back where Cisco said it ought to be, it looks as shiny and new as an old truck could. The front passenger seat has a number of parcels tied up with ribbons that look store-wrapped. One contains a lot of chocolate: milk and dark, fudge and ginger, the kind of chocolate purchased by the piece in a store where they box it carefully. One contains a pair of sinfully soft silk pyjamas in dusky dark blue. One contains a runner's watch, the kind that counts a thousand things at once and looks like something somebody who knew nothing about it pointed to an item in a catalog. And one contains - well - a phone loaded with Tinder, and a photo book meant for a coffee table but with risque-bordering-on-exposed photographs of both gentlemen and ladies. Happy holidays, Cisco. There's no note, save for the luggage tag attached to the keys.

'I almost found you a somebody for the holidays but I wasn't sure on picking out your type. Santa'. ]

[Locked to Cat C]
Hello, Cat.

[Locked to Louis D]
Happy early Christmas, Louis.

[Locked to Cisco D]
Hello, Cisco. Are you well?

[Public]
[Posted anonymously, much later.]

There's a hunter in town.