InsaneJournal

Who: Irene & Elias.
What: Meeting.
Where: In a dream.
When: UM FOREVER AGO. Not that Chi & I forgot we had this log from March, no no.
Warnings: The end of the world?



Dreams were a complex landscape, simultaneously simple and absurd. The strangest notes suddenly seemed routine, and even Irene didn't question the physics of it as she walked beneath a smoldering sky. Morocco was a balmy heat, and despite a lack of recent travel, she recognized the dusty stage immediately. This was far from the luxury of five-star, Marrakech hotels. The alleys were narrow and filled with too many people, too many signs, too many smells. The writing was a blur of indecipherable hieroglyphics, mirroring no known language. Scents on the air were strange and sweet, ruddy spices mixing with garbage gone ripe in the sun. Despite the hustle of the marketplace, everything was balanced on a crisp kind of silence. Nobody spoke, and the trot of camel hooves were a whisper in the distant sand. Her dress was a striking turquoise, which happened to match the elaborate tiles of a mosque as she passed by. An equally blue scarf draped her hair and face, so that only eyes of ash and violet peeked out.

Elias didn’t see colors the way most people did. Instead of taking in wholes--blue sky, tangerine sun, yellow ground--Elias saw bits of detail, speckles of light and shape that made up everything he saw. As he moved along the alien road, he brought with him the pieces of his awareness that made him what he was: the artist’s keen sense of texture in the grimy dust and the depth of uneven colors, the boy’s hunger for observation, and the teenager’s sense of asphalt resignation. He looked younger, thinner, and less healthy in his dream, probably something to do with how he thought of himself, the sweat sticking the paper-thin shirt to his chest and the strange geometric patterns inked into his skin mere suggestions against the utterly American attire. He stood next to her without knowing why, his posture a slight slouch and his eyes the only thing about him with no color, not deeply brown or intensely blue, just black and without reflection. “Where is this?” He stared at a sign without comprehension, but it was a dream, and he wasn’t worried.

"You don't know?" It didn't seem so strange to her, that he should find himself here without knowing the coordinates. That's what this place was for, and Irene understood that inherently with no real ground for such confidence. She asked only to clarify, and her accent was a striking juxtaposition with the dry landscape. Her words were meant for rolling moors thick with fog, which - needless to say - was nowhere near here. She found that he was nonthreatening, scrawny in the way dogs could be in the Pikey dogfighting rings, and the fact that she didn't look at him meant she was comfortable. "Don't worry," she explained with a knowing smile behind blue gauze, "it's not real." Meaning that real locales held plenty to worry about. The sun on the horizon in that moment swelled, it's glowing orange making the transition into something massive and red. A supernova without the heat, it licked the atmosphere with a dozen fiery tongues while she watched on, unperturbed. The people that milled through the distant marketplace were faceless, and therefor eyeless, so they took no interest in the dying sun.

Elias’ character, in every incarnation, real or otherwise, was pervaded with a complete lack of fear. Even in this alien place, he was beyond the reach of most people, not invincible but rather without conceivable pain. When he was a kid, that was thanks to the drugs, and as an adult, it was because of the character he had fought to assemble from what was left without them. Irene would recognize about his appearance a scrappy refusal to die no matter what, and so he stood in this place without worry, and simply nodded at her reassurance. In the dream he was surprised to find that Sherlock was not with him to explain every little thing, and after a moment of surprise, he luxuriated in the ignorance, watching the play of light over the brown buildings. After some interminable time, he said, “I know you from somewhere.” It was conversational, accompanied by an addict’s, absent smile.

She watched the white, opalescent sand roll across her bare feet, noticing for the first time that the breeze carried with it a coolness, something that should have been impossible with the bursting star before them. The gentle wind rustled the sheer layers of her gown and the veil slipped from her dark hair to tumble across the sand and eventually out of sight. Irene turned to him then, although she knew that if she could not recognize him, he should not be able to recognize her. Even so, the fact that he was the only one with discernible features must have meant that she should make efforts to remember him. Irene reached for him, more comfortable than most would be with touching a stranger. Both sets of fingers fanned across the carve of his cheekbones and held him there as she inspected the abysmal black of his eyes. There was no reflection of herself to be found in them, and for a moment, that gave way to an understanding that it would be too easy to forget who she was here. She was not in Vivienne's head, and yet she was not in London with the others. Then she remembered, as the illusion of reality ebbed and flowed, that this was a dream. "No, you don't." Even so, the words were whispered and convincing. Hush now, forget me. She dropped her hands.

Elias wore a child’s white basketball shoes--or perhaps his feet were not those of an adult. It was Elias’ youth culture that dictated a strange preference for shoes, a scale of luxury that was signified not by the quality of your clothing or character, but rather the expense of your shoes. In that culture, “Payless” was a high insult, and even if you turned your shirt inside out to wear the next day, your tread was the measure of your status. All adults like to think they’ve grown out of such things, but in reality, Elias tended to look at people’s shoes to see what their salary was like, and where he saw delicacy and pedicures, he saw wealth.

He was visibly surprised she would touch him, not afraid but obviously used to people keeping their distance from the hollow-eyed haunt of his past. He would not have hurt her regardless of who she was, and because she could not hurt him, either, he just stood and looked into her eyes until the drifting sand of memory piled up to the point that he could reach it. He put a hand out, all delicate bones and LA river silt, and he caught the shift of the blue material as the wind rearranged it in his direction. He let it slide through his rough fingers. “No,” he said, now convinced. “I do.” He paused for a moment, looked up at the blinding sky, searching for a name.

She watched the artist's youthful hand graze fabric of sky sediment. An ocean of time stretched between that brush of starved fingertips and the way he canted his head back in consult with the glowing sky. Hours were lost, centuries even, as time passed strangely in dreams. Enough time for nuclear holocaust and the fall of civilization. The sun still glowed like a massive blood orange on the horizon, but the marketplace was somehow reduced to nothingness by the time she noticed it again. Bits of blue tile like pebbles in the sand. Irene watched the skyline with a frown, displeased by the certainty in his voice. Even in a dream, her makeup was precise. That dark hair was tousled, but her mouth was carefully lined in carmine and pressed into a strict line. When she spoke, it was into the wind, and she didn't take her eyes off of the decaying star. "How do you know me?"

He looked away from the star, only temporarily lost in the palette of his mind, taking bits of color together and making odd mental notes about the way they sank into each other. The artist became progressively gray while the space around him burned with color, and he unthinkingly added depth and layer to everything around him as he thought. When she finally spoke, it was as if he’d just seen her for the first time, and he stuck his skeletal hands in his pockets in a bizarrely defensive manner that he had not betrayed so far. Yet he smile, his dark eyes knowing. “You’re Sherlock’s Woman.” He said the last word with a echo of respectful meaning that wasn’t flippant in the slightest.

Despite the respective swing of his tone, she turned on him like a grecian goddess. Simultaneously displeased and amused in her flowing blue gauze. She nearly said something about not being anyone's woman, but in realizing that that was more in line with something that Vivienne would say, Irene steered clear. "And you are his artist." It was a simple deduction, as she recalled the artist being mentioned beyond their door. What a curious thing, she looked him over in the same way one would appraise a dog at the pound. "How is he?" Because she would never ask the man himself.

In his turn, Elias almost said that he was not Sherlock’s artist. Sherlock didn’t even like him, he almost said. But it all went unsaid, wind sweeping through and picking up the thoughts to take them away out over the desert. Her appraising gaze made this Elias more uneasy than it might have in the waking world where everything was thought and not emotion, and the unhealthy pallor started deepening into bruises under his eyes, and he eased back a couple inches. Yet he was still friendly even as he distrusted her. “He is in pieces, a whole circus of jugglers with fire in the air.”

That really wasn't an answer at all, but Irene made no mention of it's inadequacy. What else could she have expected? Sherlock would not have given a direct answer, either. "Sounds like a drag," and it was more Vivienne's wording, but Irene liked it. What she liked, she confiscated. Tied it up with a little ribbon, buffed it clean with an accent of English roses, and called it her own. Despite this, Irene found that some flourish was lacking, she had the secretive eyes but no ambivalent smoke signals to garnish. "Is he still sore over the Moriarty thing?" She had to ask, Sherlock hardly seemed the type to forgive and forget. Her attention was sidelong, frostbitten birthstone eyes giving way to something younger in their uncertainty.

Elias’ brows dropped back toward his ears in humor and disbelief. “‘Sore,’?” he echoed, shaking his head. “I don’t think that covers it. He’s taking the guy apart piece by piece. You know it’s only a matter of time before he strikes back.” This final ‘he’ was not Sherlock but Moriarty, indicated by a bleak change of tone and a little ripple of watercolor blue through Elias’ appearance, as if he was a canvas recently dipped in chalky water. “At you, or John, or Mycroft. Whoever is handy.” Elias put his mouth to one side and looked again at the sky. The people I pissed off were never that imaginative.”

Her only armor was a crooked look. Irene very much doubted that Moriarty would strike through her as opposed to John or Mycroft. Not merely because of amicable terms, of which she still supposed that under some realm of extended imagination, they were operating. More so because Irene made a point keep her own survival as the topmost priority, her secrets were worth too much to kill her. "Few are," she murmured at the tail end of his words. Moriarty was, above all things, imaginative. She opened her mouth to add something else, but movement stirred on the horizon and drew her eyes. The sun was expanding, the blood orange bloomed, preparing to devour them. Irene glanced to the boy, and a knowing smile rose to the salted banks of her siren whisper, "It's time to wake up."