Who: Emily Andley (wordsaremusic) [Narrative or open for violence or whatever, yo.] What: Knee-deep in the worst place to be in London. Where: Haven. When: Backdated like whoa, of course. Some period between days one and two of shit getting real. Warnings: None to speak of.
It was dark. (It was always dark.) It was dark, and cold, and Haven maintained the powerful acoustics necessary for God’s House long after it had been converted into a literal home -- which meant the banging and crashing and occasional short, shrill scream bounced off stone walls to land neatly in Emily’s lap. At some point, bitter tears had dried up to mere grit stinging her eyes, though the high whine of panic still jangled along tightly-strung violin nerves. Her mind was a dusty whirl of words, too much and too little, all of it competing for dominance. They roared, blaring through Emily’s head like sirens, like the deafening din of jungle teeming with chirping-hissing-lowing life, and Em Andley was unable to find her own language through the racket. She was voiceless, incoherent, and her slow creep down the staff wing of Haven was solely thanks to auto-pilot animal urge. Feeling senseless -- deaf, blind and mute; was she? (Wasn’t she?) -- Em’s contribution to the evening’s chaos were shallow, juddery breaths as she kept white-knuckled hands pressed hard against the wall, and edged out toward the building’s main, bleeding body.
Things lurked further along the way. Dream things, nightmare things, monster-in-the-closet Hell things which melted through the thick stone in hunt for specific dreaming souls. When one moved past and paused to rub up against her legs like a cat (a large, spider-eyed, smiling cat), Em made a choking sound at the sandpaper scrape of its body; the raw, hot burn of skin removed from flesh. Her kicking out was as stupid as it was defensive -- she couldn’t think, couldn’t keep her thoughts in a straight or sensible line, in matching words and sounds, or shapes she could fit her mouth around. Her tentative steps down the hall turned to lashing out at the ugly creature which had hurt her. It chittered laughter in a hundred braided-together human voices, blinking its countless inky eyes at odd intervals, each unsettlingly out of time with the others. The sight was wrong, like perception turned on its nauseated head, the world distorted through fish-eye lens. When it tensed its sharkskin body like cheetah ready to give chase, the instinct of hindmost lizard brain took over. Em ran.
She sprinted down the endless hall, barelegged and bleeding, inarticulate but still able to act. To know that everything had gone wrong, that the sky was falling down upon their heads. She ran the way she had been weeks prior, when Emily’s most immediate concerns were keeping Haven in order while its engine broke away, and dealing with the sharp, cold discomfort which was new-found fear of Gryff. That seemed minuscule now, inconsequential but for the running. Her breath was battery acid through her lungs and the thing behind her was calling out words she couldn’t understand, but in a tone she knew meant playful, inflection which reminded her of men with slick smiles down dark, damp streets. Emily ran even when the floor beneath her feet was shards of broken glass, when she passed a body torn apart easily as a ragdoll’s, and there was no time to check who it was (broken glass, or broken bones?), only to keep running. A sharp turn around the corner left smeary red footprints along the floor, evidence of Em was here if one only knew how to look.
One of the vacated bedrooms was moderately safe haven inside Haven; she dodged inside rabbit-in-burrow, shoving heavy door shut and bracing for the inevitable impact of some spider-eyed Cheshire Cat demanding its dinner. It never came. With the door closed and Em braced against it, she panted instead of prayed, all too aware of a lack of locks on residents’ doors -- a turn of the knob, a good hard shove, and that would be that. Nothing. Something sing-song, maybe, but it was just noise, endless noise all static and fright, and there were important things at the back of her head she kept reaching for, but they remained stubbornly beyond her grasp. The cat was what shook her back to the hell of reality, here and now. Ophelia’s pet (it had a name, it was called something, but she didn’t know what, what, what), double its size courtesy fur stood on end, ears flat against its head and making endlessly low and angry noises from beneath the bed. Ophelia’s room. It was meaningful. Emily -- heart racing, lungs screaming for more-no-more air, hair stuck sweatily to the back of her neck -- looked around and knew wrong, but could push no further. The cat stared at her, then beyond. She shuddered, heard a piercingly long scream which reached notes unheard of before cutting off abruptly, then shuddered again.
Instinct said to find a weapon, to defend herself, but Ophelia’s bedroom was sweet and harmless, was ballet and baking, not a single sharp object in sight but for the glass which Em picked from the soles of her feet. It was only after she reached out a hand toward the cat, and it hissed and backed further away, that she squeezed both eyes shut, took a sick, slow breath, and reached for the doorknob to assess the world outside.