daniel webster (occupation: recluse) (![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} ex_published349) wrote in ![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} doorslogs,@ 2014-02-22 21:19:00 |
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What: Some changes in door-vegas communication.
Where: Daniel's head.
When: Lately.
Warnings/Rating: Safe.
There was no feeling associated with consciousness at first. It was like blinking for Henry, blinking awake in a new body and then dying again. It was sad that it was such a common feeling, this alien sense of self in his own body, but Henry was used to powers outside of himself twisting flesh into something he didn’t recognize, and it was usually a blessing to wake up to it rather than experience the transformation himself. Still, he wasn’t used to the flickering, pieces of vision without time between, without meaning or the ability to interpret them, life-nothing-life-nothing. After some interminable time, a moment and forever together in the same infinity filled with countless flickers of sight, Henry gained memory. The flickers stopped being an instant alone and began to be a series, all similar but none precisely alike.
Strange visions, beginning with white constructs in perfect alien lines that resolved into convex shapes that swiveled past him, as if he was turning in a still field of white porcelain; a thin face too blurred to be recognizable, set with dark eyes and dark brows; a white cat, the pads of its small paws almost fluorescently pink, sleeping on a green cushion. Henry felt his awareness blinking in and blinking out, but he never felt anything long enough to think, nor was any vision long enough to allow frustration, an old friend, to grow strong, until a morning under the strange white ceiling, recognizable now that Henry realized what it was, when someone else’s eyes came open and Henry felt a drinker’s headache hit his consciousness like an anvil. He hadn’t had a hangover in at least a hundred years, and it took him a moment to recognize it. Pain he associated with transformation, with new forms, not so trivial a thing as a headache. It was a constant inconvenience, and he waited without thinking for it to vanish in a moment, and he had time to be surprised when it didn’t.
More visions strung more realities together. A steel pot glinting in high shine broiled in a box made of polished white stone and silver. A library filled with flat books cut into neat squares curled womblike around perfect clear bottles filled with amber liquid. Foreign black letters moved in curls over a box filled with light as thick fingers poked a rhythm on its horizontal second half.
He saw water, impossibly clear water in a white pond, and then he watched it rise up and over his line of sight, as if drowning was a thing to watch from a distance.
Finally, finally, it was only The Book that made it all into sense, Henry’s book, the gold-gilt pages and the leather cover, sitting there on a table piled with leaves of printed paper and beautiful crystal glasses stained with amber, and the sight of it made Henry realize, and made him speak. Daniel?
The vision rocked back and forth, shifting as the world moved left and right in startlement, the floor sank down as the walls rose up, and new senses joined the old. Taste, a dry tongue always thirsty, gone sandpaper with mossy whiskey pickling the tastebuds. Scent, recognizable to Henry as a combination of liquor, cooking smells and the printer’s ink, flooded off the papers lying at odds on the table, but hearing didn’t join taste vision and scent until Daniel’s vision steadied, leaned back to take in the full white kitchen, and the man spoke, voice echoing and muffled by the hollows of his own skull, now suddenly shared by both of them the way it never had been before. “Henry?”