Ella Dean is a (chanteuse) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-05-09 02:12:00 |
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Entry tags: | norman osborn, white rabbit |
Who: Ella & Neil
What: Handing over responsibilities
Where: Dreams
When: Recently
Warnings: None!
More often than not, Neil didn’t remember his dreams. Sometimes bits and pieces lingered in the morning, but he rarely ever awoke with full remembrance of what, if anything, had filled the hours of sleep which usually left him feeling like no time had passed at all. Sure, after spending some time in Marvel land, he’d been plagued by nightmares, and some of those he remembered with sharp, jagged clarity, but ever since he’d stopped drinking they’d started to diminish a little. They still popped up every now and then, dreams of wicked goblins and Sam and brutal, merciless violence, but fortunately tonight was mild, almost normal, with no hint of darkness in sight.
Difficulties with alters aside, he wasn’t a very complicated person. It was a dream of home, of sprawling land and rolling hills, of a large, stately manor that had been in his family for generations; grey stone and ivy climbing up the walls. high windows and hard edges. He was alone, however, the family of his childhood notably absent, and apart from a cool breeze there was no noise, no sound, just a quiet sort of calm Neil found himself relishing as he walked the grounds. Here, he was younger by a decade or so, a careless sort of ease in his stride that he’d lost somewhere after college. This was nice. He didn’t mind being alone, didn’t mind the sun disappearing and reappearing from behind the clouds whenever it liked. He could have gone inside, where doors and windows were open invitingly, but he chose to remain outdoors.
The ground sloped downward after a stretch, a small hill that lead to others, larger and deeper the further one got, and that was where Neil stopped, lying back against the grass with his hands folded behind his head. He didn’t realize this was a dream, exactly, but he didn’t not realize it either; he just wasn’t thinking about that at all.
Ella didn’t dream of green places. When she dreamed memory, it was the little house with the ironed-straight curtains in the living room or the granite-and-concrete yawn of New York. She dreamed Central Park now and again but outside, not in and she dreamed music - she dreamed music most of all. She didn’t dream Coop even when she’d lain down and tried, hard as she could in the beginning and she didn’t dream things she couldn’t feel. Sunshine, that was Ella, soaking-warm like Louisiana and sweet like syrup on the tongue. It wasn’t her dream, that much she knew in the way that was knowing in dreams but the grass beneath bare feet was soft, and it was springy; it wasn’t dried like long summers parching it down to nothing. She walked carefully, for all the enjoyment of the grass, and she was soft yellow faded dress and bare legs and curly blond hair all sunshine-lit behind her. She walked carefully because she was balancing something in her hands, and she walked toward the man stretched out on the ground, comfortable as anything, because he might know the way.
There was a way, Ella knew, she just didn’t remember it right now. It wasn’t right that she didn’t remember and there were other things she didn’t remember just now but she thought perhaps he might.
She came to a stop, sundress that came below her knees, and young, the careless way the young were, as if they didn’t think at all about it. She knelt, carefully, tucking the dress beneath her - she knelt like maybe she’d been told something about it, to do it ladylike and she did it now, all little pats of her hand and tucks of her dress under her knees.
“Cookie?” She held out the plate that had been in her hand. It was white: the cookies were misshapen-round, and each of them had five raisins, pointed up, like dice-sides. She said it companionably, like there was nothing unusual at all about it at all; dreams were never unusual. “You look like maybe you could be using one.” Her voice was sweet as tea and it had the rounded-together sounds of somewhere not green hills and stately manners at all.
The presence of another in his sanctuary didn’t faze him. She wasn’t threatening, the woman, and no dark clouds rolled in to cover the sun and hint at some sort of trouble approaching. Neil pushed himself up onto his elbows when she stopped, watching as she knelt beside him on the grass. She wasn't familiar, but then again she could have been anyone, as summers at home had hosted party after party populated by pretty young women in sundresses. Maybe she was lost, or maybe she was early. He couldn't remember if he was supposed to be expecting someone.
"Thanks." There was no hesitation; he took a cookie as though it was the most natural thing in the world, which it was, at least here. "Are you here for the party? It hasn't started yet."
Ella would not have thought green hills and soft grass could be a sanctuary. A sanctuary was white-painted boards and sun through clear glass windows and the meld of voices in descant praise. A sanctuary was the museums and galleries in New York, art that everyone hushed up over, like they were praying as they walked from exhibit to exhibit. But she was unconcerned smile when he picked up one round cookie and she withdrew the plate, setting it down, white china on grass-green. “No,” she said, considering it thoughtfully, and she picked up her own cookie in her fingers, breaking it into three parts that were perfectly even. She didn’t think she was early and she didn’t think she was late and she didn’t remember a party. She looked at him, trying to remember. There was a memory there, something important.
But she didn’t think it was a party.
“No, I don't think so. I think I’d know if I was meant to be here, you know, honey? I don’t think this is my kind of place.” All that thoughtful was smoky-soft. “Are you holding one?” He didn’t look like he was getting ready for a party. He looked relaxed, real calm. Ella hadn’t seen calm like that, the quiet kind in a long time. She smiled; he looked peaceful.
He accepted her response without question. Well, if she wasn’t there for a party, then there must have been some other reason. The specifics didn’t seem important. Nothing did. “You’re not meant to be here?” Neil tipped his head to the side, curious, as he bit into his cookie. He wasn’t sure what significance it held, this woman being here, home, if she wasn’t mean to. Maybe, as he’d previously thought, she was lost. It was easy to get lost here, if you weren’t familiar with the terrain. He shifted into a proper sitting position when she asked if he was holding a party, glancing back over his shoulder at the house. It was still quiet, still empty. There was no hint of laughter, or sounds of movement; nothing to suggest a get-together was in the throes of preparation.
“No, I don’t think I am,” he shrugged. “It’s just me here, and I don’t usually hold the parties. My parents do.” He paused, letting the silence linger, before a sudden question struck him-- almost as an afterthought. “I don’t mind, but why are you here?”
The cookies were rolled oats and soft-sweet raisins, Ella crumbled hers between her fingers and the raisins dropped into the grass. Five. All pointing up like sides on a dice. He didn’t seem like he was real prepared for a party. Party was noise and it was streamers. It was people, all crammed in but it wasn’t much like they could be crammed together on all that green. If it was his parents’ party, maybe it was quiet. Tea served in cups and saucers, sandwiches sliced real thin. He had an accent, it burred in his throat like a note struck on a cello string.
“I don’t know,” she said, and she tipped her chin up from looking at the raisins neatly in a line, one fingertip extended to nudge the furthest into order. She was unconcerned blue eyes and candid calm but tears had begun to slide down her cheeks, one by one by three. Ella didn’t appear to notice. “I thought you might. You like the cookies? Made ‘em myself.” It was shy pride, a grin. “It’s better than storebought. Cheaper, too.” There was a brief, sharp note of something like white, flaring out all that green, a noise that was color more than it was noise. Static. The thin cry of a child, young. Ella blinked. “You want another?” She looked at the plate.
The tears registered slowly, a blip in his idyllic calm. They were quiet, smooth, but sad, and sadness didn’t belong here. Everything about this place was bright and peaceful; not quite happy, that was too close to a lie, but enough so that the absence of that particular emotion wasn’t noticed. In this dream, home was a physical manifestation of a place, not people. Neil finished the rest of his cookie, and then he frowned, though his concern barely touched the surface. “I do,” he said, of liking them. “Homemade is always the best. Why are you crying?” She didn’t even seem to notice, which struck him as rather strange. Then there was that cry, that shift in something, and he began to wonder what she’d brought here. “Another,” he repeated slowly. “No, that’s alright. Did you hear that?” He had the distinct sense that it wasn’t part of his dream; young children held no significance for him.
Her face was quizzical: Ella reached up gingerly, and she put fingertip of her index finger to her own cheek and seemed surprised, consternation that it came away damp. It seemed like a place that wasn’t somewhere you cried. “I didn’t know,” she said to tears, and she slid the heels of her palms over her eyes as though she could wipe them all away. It was a young gesture, but when her hands slid down to her lap once again, the salt-streaks were visible. “I don’t think I can help it.” It was the cool quiet once again, birdsong, purely sweet that trilled in the same rhythm, like clockwork, like a toy wound up in a cage. Ella smiled through tears, bright, happy.
“Hear it?” The birdsong twisted, a cry again, sharper, more plaintive. She had picked up the plate, but the cookies slid, one by one from the plate to the grass. “Oh. Is that Beth? That’s Beth.” It was something more pressing than a memory, more urgent than a dream. Somewhere, Ella twisted, turned. She was calm, dream-calm as she turned to look at him. “It’s Beth.”
A hint of something like unease crawled up his spine, a cool chill in the midst of warmth. Neil shifted again, his clothing rustling with each movement of his limbs, and he almost reached to feel the wetness left behind by tears for himself before catching himself and letting his hand drop to his side. “There’s nothing to cry about here,” he remarked, his frown deepening. Something was wrong. Maybe that was why she’d come here. Maybe he was meant to fix it. Before he could suggest it, though, that sound started up, but no amount of scanning the landscape revealed the source. Oh, he did hear it, and he turned back to her when she put a name to the cry. He didn’t know anyone named Beth; there was no significance there, not for him. “Who’s Beth?”
She watched the little movement of his hand with the detached interest of the observer, as though the tears and his reaching has nothing to do with her. Ella backed on up, she shuffled knees and grass stains spread over the yellow dress the way her momma had told her never to let happen. “It don’t look like the kind of place you cry over,” she said, admiring all that green and quiet and she turned to look at him once more, wide blue and crushed blond curls and the cookie in her hands fell in three parts, again and again. Static.
The green disappeared. They were in a yellow room, the kind of place folks called ‘cheerful’ even if all that yellow made the room look a little smaller. There was a stove, curtains at the windows that covered up utility blinds - they were cream colored birds on a burnt orange background and they looked cheerful too and they didn’t do a damn thing about the room’s size. The table was scrubbed bare wood, Ella stood in bare feet on tile floor with her left hip against the table and the plate of cookies was in the very center of the table, all five cookies studded with raisins. Five to a cookie, turned up like the side of a dice. The infant on her right hip was sleepy-warm, wide blue-eyed baby curiosity.
“This is Beth,” Ella said calmly. “But I’m asleep.”
The room and the cheerful curtains disappeared, they were back in all that green. The baby stayed, grizzled some with the fabric of that yellow dress grasped in her fingers. “I’m asleep,” Ella repeated, sadly.
“No,” he agreed. Crying belonged in quiet, solitary corners, where sunlight didn’t quite reach when it streamed through the windows and small bodies could become one with the shadows. Here, out in the sun amidst lush green and cool breezes, tears just didn’t fit. But then it wasn’t green anymore, and they weren’t outside; the sudden change in scenery was enough to propel him to his feet. Neil knew this wasn’t anything that belonged to him, because it not only looked wrong but felt wrong. Home was home, but it had never felt warm and cheery, not like this place did. His gaze settled on the woman first, and then the cookies, like the one he’d eaten, but the baby was new. Beth, she said. The crying had belonged to Beth, who was the infant, and with a calm sort of logic he reasoned that Beth must be the blonde woman’s child.
He blinked, and then they were back home. The baby, it seemed, had come with them, but he didn’t understand how the woman could be asleep. Unless he was asleep, too? “Can’t you just wake up?”
Ella smoothed a hand over Beth’s head, pressed lips to the wispy hair on her crown but it didn’t soothe the infant. The baby didn’t seem to register her presence, with fingers tight-as-tight in the faded florals of her dress. Ella shook her head, blond curls dusting her shoulders back and forth and she stood on soft green grass she’d never seen with tepid sunlight on bare shoulders and Beth a weight in her arms that wasn’t there at all. “I’m asleep,” she said simply, as if there were no waking up, as if there were no answer. “I’m asleep and she isn’t.” She jostled the baby on her hip, and she looked up at the man who dreamed of quiet, of rolling green and birdsong. It wasn’t anything like her own dreams and it had nothing sad or bad or strange in it at all. Ella rocked and she swayed and the baby didn’t cease crying. The lullaby was familiar. It didn’t have notes and it didn’t have words, it was dreamed thin, the way of falling asleep to a tune. Ella hummed and the baby cried, and the peace, the green soft peace was broken.
“She won’t sleep,” Ella said sadly, “Maybe I’m not real anymore. You take her?” She held the baby out, trusting.
It occurred to him, then, that she might not be able to wake up. Otherwise, it stood to reason that she would. Neil’s experience with children was minimal, distant memories of when his younger siblings were babies and watching the nannies at work all he really had to call upon, but he felt sorry for the sad woman, and he felt sorry for her baby. He watched as she attempted, and failed, to soothe the infant’s cries, but even with the strange understanding that mother and child were somehow separated he was still surprised when she held her out. For a moment he paused, blinking and unsure, before he tore his gaze away from the baby and looked at the woman.
“I think I’m asleep too,” he ventured, uncertain. “But I can wake up.” Yes, he felt very strongly that he could, whenever he liked. Slowly, oh, so slowly, he moved forward, trying to recall how his nanny had held his siblings; his mother’s interactions with her children had been brief, at the start of their lives and no further. While he was undeniably unskilled, Neil made up for what he lacked in experience with extreme care, holding the baby as though it were a delicate thing made of glass that might shatter at any moment if he wasn’t careful.
Ella wasn’t so sure of anything as she was that it wasn’t damn right she wasn’t awake and it wasn’t damn clear why she was not. She knew with the clarity of lucid dreaming, that there was something that meant sleep could not be thrown off as easily as rolling over, as sliding from dreams and cool cotton sheets into wakefulness, and she had only the faint lurking menace of something dark and ill-intentioned, malevolent like a bruise. Ella shivered and the clouds rolled in across that blue, blue sky, purpling thick. “That’s it, honey,” she said encouraging, soft wisp of a voice as smoky as all that dark. She looked up at the sky and she held out her hands, spread palm up, like a child heading to catch the raindrops as they came.
“The key’s under the mat,” she said, conversationally, tipping her head back and she smiled up at that sky, “I ain’t never seen so long without rain in a while. They don’t keep keys there, in New York, but I figured it was enough like home I could try. 53, that’s us.” The address, something that was conventional and stoic and largely numbers rather than letters, she shoved at him, something as the rain that was saltier than rain ought to be began to fall.
Neil didn’t want the clouds there, but he couldn’t exactly make them go away. Sheer will accomplished nothing, and he looked back towards the house, not quite panicked, but unnerved enough to want to seek shelter. He looked down at the infant in his arms, something tugging on the back of his mind that suggested this was much more than just a strange dream. “The key?” Somehow, he felt as though he should remember that bit of information, even if he wasn’t quite sure why. “It rains, sometimes. I remember there were days when it wouldn’t stop. But I don’t like it,” he said simply. He didn’t like the dark clouds, or the way the sky changed. He didn’t like how the calm breeze had picked up speed and become almost threatening.
“Wait,” he said when she shoved at him, arms tightening to keep hold of the baby. “53 what?” And then the rain came, and he stepped back, closer to shelter, though the salty wetness made everything blurr strangely.
“North Boulevard.” She gave him the street address and she was calm in all that rain, calm as salt drenched through the sundress and over bare feet in the grass, she shaded her eyes with her hand and she looked at him and she smiled, all blond hair plastered to her cheeks. “It isn’t raining there,” and Ella didn’t care about clouds drawing in and she didn’t care about the rain drumming down and the silenced bird song. “You dream real nice,” she said, and the smile was sad, sliding through all that rain, and there was salt water enough that if she was crying still, stood there in the grass that it couldn’t be seen.
“I don’t know you,” she said softly, “But you dream real nice.”
Fifty-three North Boulevard. Dreams often became distant wisps in the morning, barely memories, but not this time. No, this time he would remember. Neil stood in the grass as the salty rain soaked through his clothing to the skin beneath and looked back at the blonde woman, quizzical in the face of her smile, but less troubled than he had been moments before. He wanted to tell her to come with him somewhere dry, but he didn’t think she would; maybe, he wasn’t even sure if she could. “I don’t know you either,” he admitted. “But I like you.” It was something he never would have said out beyond the confines of his dream, but she seemed nice, this woman, sweet like some of his sisters were, and it wasn’t fair that she and her baby should be separated. He repeated the address back to her, even as he took another step back, and another, and her outline became blurrier through the rain. “The key is under the mat,” he added. “I won’t forget.”
Ella was charcoal on damp paper, a portrait smudged out by heavy downpour. “Won’t forget,” she echoed, but her eyes were steady on the baby in his arms and not the man at all. “Won’t forget.” She turned, and she walked away, yellow damp dress clinging and the grass soft beneath her feet. There wasn’t one bit of birdsong left and there wasn’t one bit of calm, blue sky and peace. But she could sleep. She could dream.