Mike (ghost_writer) wrote in crownplazaic, @ 2021-09-02 08:24:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log/thread, james conrad, mike enslin |
Who: Conrad and Mike
What: Bad dreams, but not.
Where: Conrad’s room
When: Backdated to the what if plot
Status: Complete
Warnings: Vague talks of child death
Conrad was dripping with sweat when he awoke, his heart pounding so rapidly in his chest, he thought for sure the organ might just give up altogether and stop. What the hell was that? What the hell had he just dreamt about? It had been so real. Every bit of it. Real to the point that he would have sworn that it had actually happened. The sounds, the smells.. The water. He'd had nightmares before. He was kind of used to them, actually. The horrors of war and even Skull Island continued to haunt him, even there at the Crown Plaza. But none of those nightmares had ever been quite as vividly-real as that had been. And why? Why had he dreamt of a hotel? Conrad had nightmares about giant beasts and war because he had seen those things. In person, with his own eyes. They related to his personal experiences. And maybe one could argue that the Crown Plaza had inspired this one. The building was actively trying to kill them, so that sort of made sense. But there were details that didn't add up. Something was off. So Conrad flipped on all of the lights in the room and knocked on the wall. Politely, despite his extremely rattled state. "Mike? Are you awake?" ------ Of course he was awake. He was so rarely otherwise these days. The thing was, after that whole “stuck within six feet of you” deal, they’d done some furniture rearranging, Mike and Conrad -- they’d pushed their beds to the same connecting wall so that at night, Conrad could still enjoy sleeping alone and Mike could go about his business of watching tv, writing or reading in his own room. It had definitely been a ghost perk, seeing as no one else would have been able to separate far enough to manage. And, being that Mike was a little lazy and also didn’t care at all where his bed was, he just hadn’t moved it back. So when Conrad knocked on his wall, all he really had to do was, well, stick his head through the wall with an expression that was questioning. “Yeah?” Conrad looked, for lack of a better word, like shit and Mike lost the sardonic sort of curious expression he wore for something more concerned. “What’s the matter?” --- Conrad probably would have laughed over Mike poking his head through the wall if he hadn't been so shaken up. The fact that Mike was a ghost was still somewhat new to Conrad so watching him go through things was still superficially entertaining. Just.. not right now. "Hey, can you come here? I mean.. all the way through? I, ah... I just need some company. I had this horrible nightmare. Scared the shit out of me." Christ, he sounded like a child, didn't he? What grown ass man needed to be comforted over a bad dream? But this had been so much more than that. He felt like he could still smell the smoke from the fire and hear the wails of a firetruck somewhere in the distance. Conrad even glanced around the room just to make sure he wasn't still back in 1408. Seemed like something it would do, didn't it? Lure him into a false sense of security, just to drag him back in again? Conrad sat back on his bed and crossed his arms. "In this dream, I was a writer. Like you. Isn't that funny? That.. That wasn't the nightmare part. It was everything else that has me so spooked." ----- Mike blinked, eyebrows raising slightly before he nodded silently and then pulled back to his own side of the wall, his own room, quick saved his computer before slipping through the wall completely. He knew it was maybe a little alarming to Conrad but it was fast, and he did look pretty spooked. No reason for being super polite now, right? Once he was solid again, pack of not-ghost style cigarettes in hand, he settled on Conrad’s bed, offered him one. “Writing is a nightmare,” he joked, but it didn’t hit just right, something felt like it was hitting all wrong, in fact. “What was -- everything else?” --- His trembling fingers took the cigarette, but instead of quietly asking for it to be lit, Conrad just sort of awkwardly frowned at it, like he was remembering something. Mike occasionally kept one behind his ear. Which was something Conrad distinctly remembered from the beginning of that dream: taking a cigarette from behind his ear and placing it on the rim of an ashtray. Weird. But maybe not worth mentioning? Conrad took a deep breath and tried to gather himself. "I was in a hotel.. Not this one. A different one. The room was bigger. Like a suite. And this room.. It started out just like any other room, but then it started fucking with me -- I couldn't get out, the door was locked. I started hearing things.. Seeing things. The thermostat had been broken. It had been so hot before.. Then it turned cold. I mean, unbearably cold. Ice on the walls cold. And then the room tried to drown me.." He shook his head and laughed a little, though it was very much a humorless laugh. Conrad realized just how all over the place that nightmare sounded. He'd left out quite a few details but even if he had included them, the dream wouldn't have made any more sense. "I had a wife. Ex-wife? And a daughter. Just thinking about them makes me unbearably sad. How is it possible to miss people that don't even exist? This has to be the hotel - this hotel - screwing with me. It just felt so real, Mike. I keep checking myself for burn marks. Right before I woke up, I set that awful room on fire. But I swear I can still smell the smoke.." -------- Jesus Fucking Christ. Mike went still for a moment, just a beat really, while he processed that. It wasn’t exactly hard to wrap his head around Conrad’s story considering, well, it was his own. He cleared his throat, lit the cigarette between his friend’s lips and then lit his own, inhaling long and exhaling slow. He’d quit once, forever ago. Extenuating circumstances had him back on his bullshit. Not that he needed to worry about the effects on his health these days. “Ten out of ten skulls on the Shiver Scale,” he said finally. It wasn’t difficult, feeling empathetic. --- Conrad's vision seemed to crawl down to slow motion as Mike leaned over to light his cigarette. That lighter.. There was nothing remarkable about it. No distinct features, no fancy artwork on the side. But Conrad couldn't help but feel like he recognized it. That lighter was the spitting image of the one he'd been holding just before.. His attention whipped over to Mike. Conrad hadn't completely connected the dots just yet, but he was getting there. The cigarette behind the ear, the lighter.. Being an author. The clothes he'd been wearing in the dream.. They had been incredibly similar to what Mike normally wore. Still, that was a huge leap to make. A very bold and harsh sort of presumption. With his free hand, he reached out, gently taking the lighter from Mike and flicking it open. His attention lingered on that tiny flame, watching it for a second before snapping it shut. "Ten out of ten skulls, hm? Is that.. what you’d give the Dolphin as well?" ------- It wasn’t so much a huge leap as a short one over a terrible void, the knowledge too much. But Conrad was making it anyway, and Mike allowed him to take the lighter, fiddle with it until the metal clicked and a fire flickered. “It’s exactly what I gave the Dolphin hotel,” he said without humor or charisma, just an honest sort of solemnity. “It deserved to go up in flames. It was an evil fucking room.” But apparently Conrad knew that now, and that wasn’t in contest. He took a drag from his cigarette, bit at his lower lip so that when he exhaled all the smoke mostly went out his nose. “Bit of a strange dream for you to be having, considering.” A beat. “Are you okay?” --- That progression from suspicion to confirmation hit Conrad deep within his core. His stomach twisted into knots, his skin turned cold. And for a moment or two, Conrad was completely speechless. Something told him that everything he had experienced was real in the sense that it had actually happened to Mike. None of it had been an exaggeration created by the Crown Plaza. Mike must have been put through every bit of that torture, and not in the form of some hyper realistic dream. Conrad tried to swallow that knot in his throat. He had been raised in a world that constantly reminded him that men don't cry, even in intense situations. But everything he'd seen was still fresh in his mind and knowing that someone he cared about had honest to god suffered though these things made his heart hurt in a way he couldn't fully explain. Finally, eventually, he shook his head. "No, not really." Trying to smoke and hold back tears at the same time was harder than it looked but boy was Conrad giving it his best attempt. Unfortunately, the tears were winning that battle. "Mike, I'm sorry." Sorry for what happened. Sorry for accidentally taking a peek into his personal life, because what the hotel had shown him felt horribly invasive. And sorry for calling Mike over to comfort Conrad over something that had happened to him. That last one made him feel particularly selfish. He stopped messing with that lighter, handing it back over. "Is this -- Are we -- You don't have to stay, if you don't want to. This must be weird for you. I don't want to upset you by talking about it." ------- It was, admittedly, a little strange to be comforting someone over his own fucked up, sad life. But it wasn’t like Conrad had known, and it wasn’t like there was anyone in the hotel who knew better how horrible it had been than Mike Enslin. Crying wasn’t an unforgivable thing, but Mike wasn’t from the same time as Conrad. Still, he was mostly silent, offering up eventually a little touch to the knee in comforting solidarity. “I know,” he admitted, because no, not really was about right. There was no okay for that one. Particularly not directly after it. He fiddled with the end of his cigarette for a moment, trying to decide what to say. “It’s pretty weird,” he admitted. “And I don’t know why the hotel would show you that. But. You know. I burned that place down, it’s over. It’s not so bad. I know it won’t help much, but I see you didn’t wreck your tv this time around, maybe we just watch a movie for a while.” --- The longer Conrad reflected on it, the worse it seemed to get. The torture was bad. Really bad. But the family parts cut so much deeper, particularly the details about Katie. Mike was right. The room was gone, it was over. But Conrad could never unsee what he'd witnessed and it utterly broke his heart that this had been Mike's reality. The loss of his daughter, the separation from his wife. Mike didn't deserve the fate he'd been given in the slightest and it crushed Conrad to discover that that was how he died. Conrad wasn't really one for physical touch and he kind of assumed that Mike was the same way, but considering what had just happened, he figured they were past quite a few emotional barriers and boundaries. With his free hand, he reached out, taking that hand upon his knee and linked their fingers together. Mike could have easily excused himself. Conrad would have understood completely if he didn't want to be there right now. But quietly, selfishly, he was relieved that Mike had stuck around. Anyone could have comforted Conrad, but it was Mike's company in particular that he wanted in that moment. He then stubbed out what remained of his cigarette on the surface of his bedstand because fuck the Crown Plaza. Fuck the Crown Plaza and the Dolphin. "Stay and watch something with me?" Normally, he might have followed that up with something bratty along the lines of, 'or else I'll trash the room anyway and you'll have no choice but to come back and scold me'. I'll annoy you until you give in. Instead, Mike would get a puppy-eyed, pleading sort of, "Please?" instead. ----------- Katie wasn’t really an ache that went away, but it had dulled a bit with time, he supposed. She’d been what had set him off on his crazy path in the first place -- looking for answers and things that weren’t there in the shadows. Some kind of terrible obsession with knowing there was more than the nothing that he’d always believed. Mike didn’t know he liked what he’d found, exactly, but knowing there was something else did kind of help in a way. It was something he thought was a little impossible to describe and not sound crazy over though, so he only nodded and then put his cigarette out too -- the hotel would fix it all anyway. Except for that lamp across Conrad’s room. That one was like a strange reminder to be behave that no one really listened to. “Yeah. I’ll stay.” he said after a beat, and then moved to sit with his back pressed against the headboard. “Budge over.” |