Wren and Selina have claws (laminette) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-12-13 23:08:00 |
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Entry tags: | catwoman, iron man, pepper potts |
Who: Wren, Justine and Silver
What: A shared dream
Where: Wren's nightmare
When: Recently
Warnings/Rating: Themes
Wren had been sleeping better since she'd moved into the new house. There was something about it that made her feel safe in a way she couldn't actually put into words. Luke wasn't there much, not with work and the academy, but even the time alone felt safer than it ever had at the apartment. Maybe it was the yard, the space, or the solidness of the structure. She hadn't lived in a house since Key West, and maybe it just reminded her of home. For whatever reason, her nightmares had diminished recently. They weren't gone entirely, and they were just vivid-vibrant when she had them, but there were fewer of them these days.
Unfortunately, when Wren fell asleep on the couch, Christmas tree lights twinkling harmlessly across the room and Gus passed out with his cheek pillowed on her hip, her sleep wasn't an untroubled one.
It was a boat, or it felt like one. The air smelled of salt, and waves buffeted the helm and crashed over the old, weak wood. The water was bracing, the kind of cold that would kill you if you stayed in it too long, but the air was hot and humid, uncomfortably so. There were no voices at first, there was only the rocking, the ice cold, and the smell of salt that wasn't quite right. It was a sticky heat, and the cold water sizzled as it seeped away from the weak wood and returned to the depths beyond. The depths, however, couldn't be seen. The stick-sick heat was so thick that nothing could be seen beyond it. It was oceanic fog, and that thick salt was molasses enough to choke as it scraped along the back of the throat.
The boat itself, if one snuck below decks in an effort to avoid the bitter-crash cold of the waves, was no boat at all. A long hallway met the bottom of the boat's rickety steps. The floor was wood, old wood that was shined well enough that things reflected in it. Only shadows now, and shoe soles that weren't there, and the smell of the lemon cleaner and oil that kept it so bright. The walls, those gave away that this was no true boat. They were white-white, pristine and without blemish. They were bare, a perfect ennui hovering over gleaming wood slats.
And like any good nightmare, there was a door at the end of the hall, one black and grotesquely bowing outward toward the hall. It was a bloated thing, the wood, and shadows could be seen beneath the bottom edge, movement and breathing, and the door threatening to give up the fight with every rock of the not-boat. The scent of salt was thicker here, in the lower level, and the heat just as unforgiving.
Wren sat on the foot of the steps in a bright yellow sundress, watching the distant door, completely unconcerned.
Justine very rarely recalled her dreams, so she was always the sort that would say she simply didn’t dream. The only times she remembered were when she talked to Pepper, but those had always taken place in the redhead’s office, a sea of carpet separating them. This was very different from anything she ever could’ve come up with. Boats were never her thing and the heat was sticky, not dry like it had been in Dubai. Standing just across from the stairway that would lead her down, Justine looked around and tried to get her bearings. It wasn’t any place she was familiar with, though she wasn’t very familiar with many bodies of water. The rivers, those she knew, in London and Birmingham, but they were never like this. She wrinkled her nose and pulled her hair back and up, into a messy ponytail. It didn’t give her any relief at all with the sticky icky heat.
Hoping downstairs would be better, Justine made her way to the staircase, peering down. She saw a woman there, with pretty blonde hair and wearing something bright and yellow. She looked down to see what she was wearing. Huh. Bare feet, super short jean shorts, and a loose, white button down short sleeved shirt that was fairly thin. Very, very weird considering she hated anything with buttons in a shirt and she usually wore skirts of some kind. “Hello?” she called, uncertain as to what, exactly, was going on. “Who’re you? Where are we?” Justine started to move down the stairs, but then she remembered what Mike always said to her about not being so trusting. She paused at the first step down from the top and waited for some answers.
Wren turned toward the voice. It wasn't a strange thing, girls in her dreams. Young ones that reminded her of herself, mostly. With the sea fog mostly engulfing the top of the steps, the girl there was just a voice, nothing that she could imbue with features. And she wasn't a lucid dreamer anyway; she had no idea that dreams were dreams until she woke from them. There was, therefore, no real thought in her response, no grand plan or attempt to understand or recognize, and there was certainly no caution about speaking to a stranger. It was indicative of her dream space, the fact that things were fluid and ever changing. A door appeared at the top of the stair, and the bloated door moved closer, and the white hallways grew white doors too, crowded things that lined the flat surface. Even the knobs were white, and the wooden floor became shinier and more reflective. She didn't question that either. She wasn't a questioner.
"I don't know where we are," Wren replied truthfully. "Wherever we are, I guess. Bad things will happen. Bad things always do," she informed the any-girl. But the any-girl likely knew that, if she was there, right? The boat rocked, and the boat heaved, and it tried to spit them out, but there was no point in that, no, none at all. A gunshot rang from behind the bloated door, and Wren's attention returned there. She glanced down to the floor, to that sliver of light and movement beyond, and she watched blood pour out from beneath it. "Do you have a towel?" she calmly asked the girl on the stair.
The woman was pretty, Justine thought, but the fog was rising and it made her want to step down, to get away from the restrictive stickiness. “Bad things don’t always happen,” she replied with an audible eye roll. Bad things usually happened. This place was creepy and she didn’t want to be there, but she didn’t know how to leave. Onwards it was. She descended a few more steps, just to clear the fog, and then she was right in front of the blonde woman. “Who-oah!” Her question was swallowed by surprise as the boat rocked and moved, her arms shooting out to the sides to steady herself. That was so not cool. The gunshot though, that stopped her cold. “Silver!” It came out a whisper, but she heard herself shout it and she ignored the blonde in favor of running past, hand flying to the doorknob and desperately trying to tear it open. “Please be okay. Please be okay.” Over and over, in that same whisper. He had to be okay.
Two other doors spoke first without opening. To Justine’s right, a woman’s voice sang “On Top of Spaghetti” in a slightly off-key but eerily pleasant voice. No one sang with her, and there was a whistling, roaring sound that made a backdrop to the noise. Out from under the door there came a rush of tar and pavement pebbles. They stopped just short of the center of the hallway itself, the door flexing and twisting until beyond there was an impression of ocean-lined road, unclear but real, the way dreams pretended to be real, pretended there were doors when really there were roads. Traffic rushed by and twisted the weeds that framed the picture in the door. It smelled of cooking asphalt, and then the door was just a closed door once more. To Justine’s left, a horrible smell of rotting flesh took over, and something moaned and pressed against the hinges.
The door ahead, the bloody door, ceased its bloating and turned solid steel. It opened, and he stepped out of it. He wore a suit made of such finely woven Italian polyester and silk that it seemed to be part of him. His clean-cut shirt was iron gray, and his tie was the gleaming chrome color of new cars. He had a gun of the same color in his right hand, and his face was beaten and bloody. The new suit betrayed none of this, only the small hints of flesh at his neck and the raw pulp of his face. He paused when he saw her. “Said to stay away from the door.” His eyes moved over Justine’s head to the woman on the stair. “Are you coming in?” he asked.
Wren watched the girl run toward the door. Girl, because she was no more than a girl, and Wren could make that out clearly as the girl moved past her. Silver's name registered as familiar, but that was all. It had that dream quality that made it impossible for her to pinpoint exactly who he was, but she knew the name, and she stood when the girl screamed and talked to the door in that desperate whisper. "He's not here," she said, not knowing where those words came from, really. "He doesn't come where I am, not if I don't call him first." And it was still a statement without true connotation. There was no face associated, no true persona.
Wren took the last step down to the floor, gingerly sidestepping the tar and pebbles with carefully placed bare feet. It was like walking a tightrope down the center of the hall and, seconds later, the center of the hall became a tightrope. She covered her nose as the scent of rot wafted past, but it made it hard for her to balance, and the tightrope swayed over deep black water, the pebbles and tar falling down into it with heavy plinks and plonks. She looked up when the bloated door changed, and her grey eyes went fear-wide. "Alexander," she said, expecting the thing that always lived behind the bloat-bleed door.
But it wasn't Alexander that stepped out, and the floor reknitted itself beneath Wren's feet. She shouldn't go inside. She knew that, and it had nothing to do with Alexander and everything to do with not crossing lines, but she didn't remember the lines just then. She didn't react to the suit, to the flesh, to the raw pulp of his face, or to the gun. "Is he inside?" she asked again, cautiously, turning to look at the girl, as if she would know.
Justine didn’t care about the doors on either side of her. She was narrow minded, focused entirely on getting the bloated door open. It wouldn’t budge, not an inch, but she didn’t want to give up. She couldn’t, not if he needed her. The blonde spoke, but Justine was insistent. “He’s there. He has to be there!” She wouldn’t have it any other way. He had to be there. The smell, that rotten, decaying smell, finally got to the point where she just couldn’t breathe without coughing and her hand loosened on the knob as her frame shook from the cough. It changed, the door, to something cold and solid and metal. The blonde said an unfamiliar name and Justine glared at her over her shoulder. “No. Silver.” It was Silver. He was going to tell her that he was okay, that nothing had happened, that it had all been just a bad dream.
She was proven right a few seconds later, the door opening and the man himself stepping out. Justine gasped, her hand clutching her heart. “You’re hurt!” He received the same glare the blonde had, for telling her she should have stayed away. “I’m not leaving. You need someone! What happened to you? Are you okay?” But he was talking to the blonde and Justine didn’t like that either. Her arms crossed, her back straightened, and she narrowed her eyes at him. “Why does she get to go inside and I get told to stay away?” The unfairness of that went unsaid, but it was loud and clear in her tone.
Silver moved slightly to one side, clearing the doorway behind him. The miasma of death did not affect him, and getting close to him was like stepping into the arctic. A chill, frost-touched air followed him as he moved, and his extraordinarily fine suit had tiny crystals of ice clinging to it. The blood was drying rapidly on his face, drawing trails from cut eyebrows and bruising eyes. His mouth was twisted from repeated blows, and his voice moved too quickly to be Silver’s, following a foreign but thoroughly American cadence. “Work,” he replied to Justine’s repeated questions. Her pouting only earned her a slight sideways tip of his head. “It’s not your door, I thought.” Silver frowned at the existence of tightropes and dark water, but he had little more to say about it. His blood-spattered hands creaked as he flexed them in the cold.
Wren was nothing if not calm. Like a still thing in a maelstrom, she stood, a still marigold in a blustery field. She watched Justine scream and glare, and she merely tipped her head, pale blonde tumbling over her shoulder, the ends of her hair going crackle-chilled in the ice-kissed air that surrounded the man in the doorway. Silver, yes, the screaming girl was right. She knew that, at least, even if the understanding was a surface thing. She looked back at the girl, and a question blossomed on her features long before it actually made it to her bluing lips. "You think he doesn't have anyone?" she asked, confused. "Who are you?" she finally asked, trying to place the girl as one of the many she'd known in her life. But no, no this girl was too clean, too well fed. The thought made the scene change. The boat still rocked, and the chill still licked the skin, but the hallway became an alley, and the scent of sex mixed with the rot that swirled in the thick, humid air. Behind the doors, on top of spaghetti became moans, and the door with the pebbles hid screams and the sound of fists on skin. She stepped forward, and she was dirty now, as the unknown girl wasn't, dirt on her cheeks and the hem of her dress torn. She closed her fingers around the gun Silver held, and she tugged on it. She turned to the girl again, then, assuming the question about the door was meant for her.
The cold seemed extreme in every sense, turning her lips blue and causing goosebumps on her skin, but Justine didn’t move. Silver was safety and she could be helpful. Mike had trained her well enough that she could defend herself and she could probably take the blonde. She didn’t like her all that much. “He has people. He just doesn’t use them.” He had her, Benji, plus all their people through the door. People would help him. “I’m his Pepper.” Justine said it without thinking, because she was, literally, the Pepper to his Tony. Before she could clarify herself, the scene changed and Justine’s mouth twisted into disgust. Her hands smushed her ears to block out the moans but that was enough to shift those sounds into music and On Top of Spaghetti became an Italian Opera. The screams became crescendos, the sound of fists on skin into the dull thuds of shoes on the floor as people danced to the music. That was much better and her hands moved down to her sides again. Only, now there was a too white sundress on her and it seemed immune to the dirt and the blood. She was still cold though. “We have the same door?” Justine was confused and she watched as the blonde went to take the gun. She moved closer to Silver, sort of half hiding behind his side and she was close enough that the ice crystals started to melt just slightly from the exaggerated warmth she could offer. “Don’t.” Only Silver should have a gun.
The temperature drop around Silver reached the point of black pain, the cold of deep space where there was nothing, and no one, no friction, no light, and an absence of heat and life so total that the very air inches from his skin seemed to consume whatever molecules unfortunate enough to drift his way. Silver himself seemed to grow darker and blacker without growing larger, the shadows on his face lengthening, the blood drying and cracking in arctic rust. Silver twisted his wrist down and across, roughly yanking the gun out of Wren’s reach and grip. “Get back.” He didn’t mean away from him, he meant away from the alley. Frostbite spread from the toes of his shoes, and he shifted to keep the two of them at his peripheral and at his back, a protective gesture. His eyes darted back toward Justine. “I am not,” he said, angrily, “your responsibility.” Silver so rarely showed emotion that the sharpness of his words were like blades. He transferred the look to Wren. “You’re not running from me,” he observed, not so sharp but even colder.
Even without a verbal admission from the unknown girl about disliking her, Wren knew, and she didn't ask for her name again. There was defensiveness in that claim that Silver had people, and in the statement that she was his Pepper, which registered as a strange understanding without true meaning. The girl's disgusted expression was what made Wren let go of the gun, hurt flickered across her features and her fingers were already sliding away when Silver twisted his wrist in a seemingly consistent, wordless statement to match the girl's command. The change behind the doors was a blink, a blip, and she understood that this girl wasn't like her. That was good, right? Even without tangible understanding, that seemed a good thing. Silver's angry sharpness made her look back at him, and the deepening cold made ice climb higher and higher up the strands of her now-dirty blonde hair. "Why would I run from you?" she asked, just as Silver shifted both of them to his back and, really, it was that movement that caused everything to change.
The rocking remained, but the hallway was gone. No dancing or opera. They were inside the bloated room now, and the waves could be heard smashing against the walls of the space. The space, which was now a large warehouse. Empty, bare, and taking on all of Silver's cold, making it more a freezer than anything else. Ice climbed the walls, and in the center a man was stretched out on the floor, nearly dead. Blood seeped out from beneath him, and it soaked into the floor and moved toward the trio with alarming speed. The man muttered things, nonsensical things, as blood continued to blossom from the gunshot wound at his groin. The girl, Pepper, was it? But Silver had said no, hadn't he? The girl might have been untouched by the blood and filth and ice, but Wren most certainly wasn't. Her hands were coated in blood, and there was a gun there, now she didn't even seem surprised by it.
Justine didn’t belong here. These weren’t her fears, her problems. They were foreign to her and when Silver’s angry words reached her ears, Justine decided she’d had enough. She wouldn’t cry, wouldn’t pout, wouldn’t plead to get her way. She would fight, if that was what he wanted. Instead of staying behind him and to the side the way he wanted, Justine moved in front of him and planted her feet. “Stop! Stop shutting me out! I can handle it! Whatever it is, I can do it.” Her hands were on her hips, her shoulders squared and her back straight. She felt much taller than she actually was, and she certainly wasn’t acting like the spoiled girl she’d come to rely on being lately. “You need me and I need you so deal with it!” She hissed the last three words, punctuating them with a sharp poke to his chest. Her finger quickly started to show the signs of a rapidly moving frostbite, but she didn’t care. He needed to get it through his thick head that she wasn’t going anywhere. She didn’t abandon people.
The blonde spoke again, something about running, and it was all too clear that Silver knew her. Justine bristled, and then shivered as the place turned into an icy box that screamed of death and decay. She hated it. She was all about life, passion, happiness. Heat radiated from her in a similar way the icy cold radiated from Silver. Her skin started to glow and flames danced along her body, the pristine white dress, along with the rest of her, unbothered by the flames. It was a cleansing kind of warmth, meant to heal, and she began to hum Hallelujah absently as the warmth started to battle the cold. Silver was being stubborn, so she turned her attention to the blonde and moved towards her. “I can help,” she promised softly, holding her hand out to the woman. “Please. Let me help.”
Silver was watching Wren with a careful and sympathetic eye. His grip on the gunmetal in his right hand was firm, and the weapon was the only thing about him that wasn’t acquiring a layer of crystalline frost. Even his eyelashes seemed weighed down by the cold, casting his gaze over the gory scene. He pondered the corpse for a little while, but to him it only looked messy and unprofessional. Too much rage there. Such things pointed a perfect arrow right at the person responsible. Silver’s lips didn’t move but his thoughts were clear. You’re a victim even when you’re a killer. It was like listening to his voice from the bottom of a well. It sounded like his usual one, no strange accents or odd cadences. You need to learn to let go.
When Justine moved in front of him, he reverted his attention to her entirely. Snow the color of stained crystal shook off the careful sweep of his short hair above his brows. The broad panes of his face looked even sharper, and the cold even more intense in the heat she provided. Silver himself had no scent; no gunsmoke, no death. He had left that locked behind the other door, and now it was just jagged frost, metal, and old blood. When she poked him the ice became suddenly solid and his chest had no give. He stared at Justine as if she was the most foreign thing he’d ever seen. His thoughts whispered out again through the widening warehouse. You can’t handle it. You don’t see danger because you’re too busy being sure you’re important. I know I’m not important. There are times when I am only a liability. You interfere because you feel you’re entitled to interfere. You’ll only die, and then I’ll just be left with the guilt of knowing you. It was cruel, and waking, Silver would never have said it. But they weren’t awake, were they?
Wren didn't notice that his lips didn't move. She knew his voice, and her mind filled in the rest, and wasn't it normal? Him not moving his mouth? The man on the floor - no corpse at all - groaned, and Wren looked from Silver to the almost-body there. She shook her head, over and over, the movement too quick for a waking person, for a living person. But she was neither awake nor alive, and she just lifted her gun arm and fired at the man on the floor. There was significant distance, and whether it was the dream or skill that gave her perfect aim wasn't exactly clear. But the man's face was blown off in a second, and she looked back at Silver. "I didn't, but I should have," she explained, with no argument about being a victim. There was no point with arguing with truth, but the letting go, that made her face shift, an jerky blink of a change, like a skip in a record or a blip in a movie. "Let go of what?" she asked in French, even as she rubbed her shoulder from the gun's kick in a way that was too alive, too awake.
But the girl, the one who was pure and pristine, who hummed church songs while a man died, she was screaming, and Wren's brow furrowed. "He doesn't need you," she said, and it wasn't meant to be unkind. But wouldn't she have heard of this girl if Silver needed her? She was pondering that when the girl reached out a hand, when she made a promise of help. The offer was met with a crescendo of sounds like the one the girl had reacted to with disgust in the hallway. Hallalujah disappeared, and the salty smell of sex swirled with the ice, a little girl crying mixing with the scent and the cold. "You don't like me," she responded with soft candor, because there had been glaring. "You can't help me. You don't understand. That's a good thing," she added, because it was, and she glanced toward Silver a second later, as the thick, congealing blood pooled around their feet. "Should I go?" she asked.
It was abundantly clear, between the two of them, that she didn’t belong wherever they were. She wasn’t wanted, wasn’t needed. She had no place, and the realization there stung worse than the cold did. The flames rescinded, the warmth faded, and she was left with nothing. This was her fear. Darkness seeped in around the edges of the room, closing in around them fast. The man on the floor had some significance to the nameless woman, and to Silver, but Justine was in the dark. Her dress started to change, gradually from the hem upwards, a smokey, swirling color that became as black as black could possibly be. “Let go of the hurt. Otherwise, it’ll eat you up inside.” Justine replied in perfect French, though she hadn’t used it in years. Silver’s words echoed in her mind. She was forcing herself into the situation, certainly, but she just wanted him to be okay. Why was that so bad? The darkness was coming quick. The body that woman had shot - Justine hadn’t even flinched - was swallowed whole as it crept closer. “You should have said,” she told Silver, accepting his rejection of her with her head held high.
She looked over her shoulder at the blonde and offered her a sad smile. “I don’t know you,” she corrected. “I don’t know those sounds, these fears.” The darkness was coming for her though and despite being absolutely terrified, Justine let it come. Why fight the inevitable loneliness that she was destined for? “You’ll go. He’ll go with you. Just...” but she stopped, her throat tight, and she turned back to Silver. “I’m sorry.” The darkness was there, lapping at her feet, dark shadows coiling up her legs and then she was falling, falling like Alice down the hole to Wonderland, except there was nothing pleasant at the bottom of this fall. Nothing but darkness, solidarity. She’d be alone because she didn’t know how to be together.
The girl spoke before Silver did, and Wren understood the French words, even though she had no idea how to put the suggestion into practice, none at all. And then there was darkness, and where was it coming from? She knew the girl was hurt, but she didn't know what the context was, didn't know the girl's relationship with Silver. She was at a loss, and then the girl said she didn't know her. But she'd glared and looked disgusted all the same, hadn't she? She managed to shake her head when the girl said Silver would go with her, because it wasn't like that, but then the darkness was dragging the girl down, and Wren became fixated on that gaping maw of a hole. The blood poured into it, and then the water broke down the walls of the warehouse, the deluge red and sticky and not water at all. It poured into the hole the girl had fallen into, and Wren glanced up at Silver as the room filled, filled, filled. She took one breath, trying to keep her head above it, but there was nothing for it. Thick, red, iron detritus filled her mouth.
And she awoke with a scream.