Aleksandra Makarov ❅ Maržanna (pavornocturnus) wrote in paxletalelogs, @ 2012-01-21 10:58:00 |
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Entry tags: | jormungandr, marzanna |
each breath screaming
Who: Adam & Juliet
What: Two acquaintances run into each other and reflect back on Halloween’s events.
Where: Pax Letale lobby.
When: Mid-afternoon.
Juliet dug into her purse, trying to find her phone. She was already running fifteen minutes late for her psychiatrist’s appointment, and if she didn’t call in that she was on her way, it would end up being cancelled. Of course, the whole reason she was even missing it was due to oversleeping, which she, if she had any say in it, was far more effective than anything Dr. Steff seemed to do. She had so many things going on these days that it was difficult to keep track of them all, though she did her best -- school, work, her doctor’s appointments, and then any free time that was left over was divided between homework and spending time with Nathaniel, which grew more and more frequent. So, of course, in the end something was going to have to slip up somewhere.
Her heels clicked smartly on the tile of the lobby as she moved across it, coming to a dead stop in the center of the room as she did everything except turn the bag inside out and empty the contents on the floor. Dark words, just shy of actual curses, lined her mouth as she was continuously defeated in her efforts to find her phone; finally Juliet decided that it must be in her apartment and slumped, feeling the weight of her sleepiness fall back over her. She would rather either go and get coffee to keep herself awake and able to do her homework, or else just go back to bed, which sounded absolutely fabulous. Either way, her plans were stopped by the appearance of a familiar looking young man.
Adam immediately drew up short, recognizing her even from his single, brief glance upward. He slid his own phone back into his pocket, locking the screen as he did. The memory of her, and of what they had done, was as vivid and sharp as if it had happened only hours before. He knew that what he recalled, clear as it was, could not possibly have happened, but that did nothing to quell the certainty within him, the familiarity and camaraderie he felt with this woman. He flicked his tongue against his labret, setting the little piercing dancing nervously. He would not be the first to speak that insanity, but he could skirt the issue, and wait to see if she would offer more.
“Hi,” he said, lamely. “I... didn’t know you lived here, too.” His smile was flimsy, unsure of itself, ready to disappear at the first sign of reticence on her behalf. Why he wanted her approval so badly he could not say, but something in him needed to be reassured by her, needed to know that she recognized him, too. “I don’t think I ever introduced myself. I’m Adam Vejas. Fifth floor.”
A nervous smile flickered over her face, as though just seeing the young man gave truth to the events of that night.
“Juliet Blackwater, eighth floor.” She certainly couldn’t be rude to him, and she adjusted her purse strap as they stood like frozen statues in the middle of the lobby. Awkward silence pulled itself around them, Juliet fidgeting for a moment while she floundered for words. “You....um, you look much better. Than last time.” Broaching the topic was probably taboo, but she felt the elephant in the room needed to be addressed. Perhaps they’d had a mutual hallucination, one where she’d turned into a frozen corpse and he’d turned into a giant snake. Then on top of that, they’d rather gruesomely killed flying people. Yeah, that was totally real.
“You too.” He shifted on his feet. He could not rightly put a name to the emotion that presently pervaded him: It was neither fear nor relief, neither good nor bad, but some unsettling amalgamation of all this and more. He wanted to tell her that it could not have been a hallucination, that he was simply not capable of such; it could not have been food or drink served at the party, nor anything else he knew of in his rather broad spectrum of medical knowledge. To speak of the reality of that night would be uncomfortable, to say the least, and would force them to face the understanding that that would surely not be the last they would see of such creatures. But to ignore it seemed to court disaster, to be willfully and deliberately ignorant to a phenomenon that might someday be the death of them. He swallowed hard, and tentatively approached topic and co-conspirator alike.
“Did they hurt you?” he asked, drawing near enough that they might not be easily overheard. “How long after were you... like that?”
Teeth sank into her bottom lip shortly before replying. “No, I...I woke up downtown. I wasn’t hurt, even though...that one pulled my hair out. I think...well, it was a little past noon when I woke, so...quite some time.” Her mind went back to linger over those events, the memories of which were vague at best. She remembered leaving the building, and bits of the fight itself, all of which she had no desire to remember, but there it was. Then they had left, she as the corpse and he as the snake. They had done their best to stay away from groups and people, even though the holiday would have given excuse to their appearances. She had found herself squirreled away in a corner between buildings, her costume ruined and feeling cold. A cab ride home had given her time to try and piece together the previous night, but when that came to naught she had concerned herself with making sure that Nathaniel had gotten home all right. After that, she had left well enough alone.
“What about you?” Concern filtered through her words, overshadowing any curiosity.
“Nothing serious.” His brow furrowed at the realization; it seemed there were benefits, he supposed, to housing a creature such as that. It had protected him well enough, after all, and he had woke up truly none the worse for wear. He shuddered to think what the Sluagh might have done to his softer human skin. “My friend Alex was, though. She and another of our neighbors...” How did he frame the night’s events and somehow still sound sane? He hoped Juliet had seen enough that night to understand, to believe he was not simply spreading some rumor, some creative little virus, like wildfire throughout their building. “They were attacked, too. She had a few cuts.”
Her other question remained, and its answer was no more soothing. “The other...” He shook his head, looking first to the floor, then willing himself to meet her eyes. “I was myself for a while, but then the rest of the day...” He shook his head, having no ready answer that would satisfy them both. There had to be some logical explanation for this, but at present he had nothing of the kind. “I know I wasn’t the only one.”
Brow furrowing as she studied his face, something in her wished that he’d not given support to the matter. That they could both laugh it off as some kind of strange Halloween occurrence, that she’d been drunk and that was what had caused such strange things to happen. But that gave her no comfort.
“Have you lived here...long? Have...things like this...happened before?” Trepidation laced her words, disclosing the fact that she was hesitant to ask for this information. Surely nothing good could come of digging deeper into the issue, opening it like some Pandora’s Box -- the bitter notion had become evident to her through years of attempted psychological help that had done little to relieve her condition and give her something of a normal life. For this strange new occurrence to suddenly rear its head set Juliet’s heart to nearly double time.
It was clear the answer she wanted, but it was not in Adam to lie. Too much was at stake for false platitudes and deceptive comfort; better to be prepared, wary, understanding of what might come. His teeth worried at the edge of his tongue as he considered his words, picking out the proper path only with some difficulty.
“I’ve been here a year and some change,” he said. The hard part came next. He shifted his weight, one foot to another, more restless than perhaps he had intended. “We’ve never been attacked, at least that I know of. But the personalities, the other shapes...” His lips pursed; he shook his head, wishing he had another answer to give. “That’s happened a few times. Sometimes that completely, sometimes just... parts. Reflections, dreams... I know how it sounds, but it isn’t just us.”
She blinked, not expecting that sort of reply. It was beginning to sound like the apartment building was less of an apartment building and more like some kind of facility for the mentally deranged. What other kind of people would believe that they turned into...these things? But after a lifetime of dealing with her own mind, Juliet was less than accepting of the idea that she was truly insane.
“So you mean, everyone in this building? The building does this, makes everyone turn into...whatever it decides to turn people into?” So why did it turn me into a frozen corpse?! And then Adam into a snake - it was all rather random, and made no sense. Adjusting her purse strap once more, Juliet tried to think of more questions, of ways to wrap her mind around this particular conundrum, but there was no logical place for her brain to latch on to.
His lips thinned again, their corners softly downturned. He wondered what name to assign what he heard in her voice; was it disbelief directed at the circumstances, or at his own unlikely story? He wondered how much more to say. A year or more before Vincent had been making equally wild claims; even with his wealth and inexplicably charismatic zeal his comments had not met with the open-minded reception he had expected. How much less could Adam, passive borderline introvert that he was, expect?
“There’s a few I haven’t met,” he allowed. “It’s possible they haven’t experienced anything at all.”
But I doubt it, he left unsaid.
He considered her choice of wording, uncertain whether he agreed with her. Though it was only since moving to Pax Letale he had experienced the dreams and visions of the great serpent - and still more recently that he had felt he had become the beast, had shared its eyes and felt the weighty burden of its ageless consciousness - it seemed to him he had always felt its presence. Not overtly, perhaps, but in small ways he could not deny upon retrospect. He swallowed hard around a rising lump in his throat.s
“I haven’t really... come to any conclusions about it. But whatever it ‘turns you into’, no matter what the extent of the shift, it’s always to the same form. Individually it doesn’t vary from... event to event. There’s a kind of pattern, I guess, at least individually, even if I can’t say what exactly that pattern is.”
Brows lowered to her eyes as she found nothing but true sincerity in his words, Juliet took what he had given her exactly as it was presented.
“You don’t...seem very upset about this. If you know about it, and it’s happened before, why don’t you move? Why do you still live here?”
He drew his lip between his teeth, worrying for a moment at its slight swell. It was a question he had asked himself a thousand times, a question to which he still had very few satisfying answers. He knew how it sounded. He knew how he sounded for knowing he was in harm’s way - and more, that those he loved were equally in danger, or perhaps more so - and doing nothing about it. And yet there was no explanation but this.
“I feel...” He drew a deep breath, letting it out slowly, feeling the last vestiges of tension leave along with it. “Like I belong here. Here at Pax specifically. I wouldn’t say I feel safe, but I feel like it’s right.” His smile was tenebrous and sad, possessing within its shadow something older than should be. There was more of Jörmungandr in it than he rightly knew. “And I’m curious, I guess. It hasn’t been all bad, so I kind of want to see where this path leads. You know?”
“Yeah...” The reply was drawn out slowly, as though she were somewhat unhappy about giving acquiescence to such a question. But it was true -- the apartment building had done everything but flat out speak to her, tell her that she belonged here. There were certainly less expensive places she could be living, places that were closer to school (like the dorms, where Dad wanted you to stay), but there was something about this building that just...felt like home. Undeniably.
“This is crazy. But I guess we’ve covered that, already.”
He smiled. After a beat, she continued. “Do you know anything, anything about why this happens?” Any way to stop it?
Adam thought a moment, trying to piece together the times they had changed, the strange occurrences that had gone on beneath that roof. There seemed little rhyme or reason to it, particularly when the disturbances did not involve their persons, exactly: the power outages, the elevator’s damage, the corpse found floating in the pool. So much that yet went unexplained.
“If there’s a pattern here it’s something I can’t follow,” he said. “Without that I don’t see any real way to figure out the why or who of it.” He smirked, laughing at his own foolish idea. “Who,” he said. “Like someone might be doing this.” He shook his head. “Nah, honestly I couldn’t even take a stab in the dark. Did you notice anything, though? Or have any ideas?” He canted his head gently to one side, curious. “Sometimes a newcomer sees things those of us who’ve been in it for a while overlook.”
White teeth dug into her lip; she had no real theories of her own, but then again, this was the first time she was really dealing with any of it. On a personal level, she thought it could have something to do with her condition - and yet that was negated by the fact that it was a shared experience. She certainly wasn’t dreaming right then, or at least, she didn’t think she was.
“I’ve been having...weird dreams. They involve another person in the building, and it’s...” Juliet stopped, unsure if Nathaniel would be comfortable with her sharing such details. No, she would be vague, and it was better for her to try and fully comprehend what was going on here. Hadn’t she been doing that her whole life with the night terrors? “It’s like its us and its not us. And when I turned into...whatever that was...it was familiar.
“This isn’t helping, is it?” Juliet shook her head, rolling her eyes at the vague description. Even if she went and fully described what was going on in the dreams, that wouldn’t help. They weren’t terribly different from her night terrors, and yet they were completely different. She couldn’t put her finger on a decent way to explain it.
“A little.”
His answer was not entirely truthful. Hers, however, had given him what he felt was substantial insight, even if it truly was not; he felt relieved, on some level, pleased that this newcomer, with whom he had shared so intimate a secret, so bloody a fight, seemed similar to him in this as well. It was not Pax alone that drew them here, of this he was increasingly certain. It was also a matter of the connections they shared, whether they understood those bonds or not. Adam wondered how well she knew the fellow tenant she dreamed of; he wondered if she had seen any transitions within or without him as well. It was becoming difficult to keep from speculating that all his friends and neighbors had some secret of their own, some subsumed identity they ignored or denied.
“Has this other person... your friend, I guess...” His head tipped again, regarding her closely. “Does he have dreams, too? Or anything else like what we... experienced?”
“I’m not sure,” she replied, honestly. They’d never discussed the dreams, she and Nathaniel; instead they’d only concentrated on their furiously blooming relationship. Never for a moment did Juliet think that whatever was going on in the building, whatever was potentially manipulating their night time memories, might also have a hand in what was going on between her and Nathaniel. The fact that he was in her dreams (even before they were dating) was a mere coincidence.
“Well, that’s not entirely true. Halloween... Remember when I asked you if you’d seen my date?” They hadn’t had a chance to speak of that particular section of the night. Juliet had been too frightened out of her mind to even really give it much thought. “When we were in the club, there was...there were strange things going on then, even before those...people showed up. I think my date turned in a cloud of smoke, or...some kind of a shadow.” They’d breezed over Halloween deciding to not speak of it, deciding to chalk it up to the other strange occurrences that had come to pass between them. “He literally disappeared, but didn’t... I thought I was imagining things.”
Adam nodded, a faint frown casting a shadow on his face. It was nothing like what he had heard before in the old hotel, but that meant nothing; in his faded memories of her he did not recognize her shape, did not know where she might have come from, very unlike what he had felt in the presence of some others in this place. Jörmungandr had not known her. It followed, then, that this other creature might also be something outside Jörmungandr’s knowledge. It remained to be seen whether that would prove a comfort or a danger.
“Were you afraid?” he asked. It sounded an odd question; his brow furrowed, realizing the potential, insulting implications his words may have. “I mean... I’ve seen things like that here, and at the party the Halloween before. But even when I was...” His black gaze darted away, something like shame welling up in his eyes. She may yet not believe him; even now his words may serve only to convince her of his insanity. But at least she had seen the great serpent, and that much she had to believe. “Even when I wasn’t myself, you know, there were some people, some creatures, I recognized. And I didn’t fear them. It felt like we were... not family, but something like.” He looked back up to her, head canted, eyes glittering. “Did you get that sense? Something in him, and you... familiar?”
It was like the idea had been waiting there, quietly biding its time, until everything fell into place with a satisfactory click. Not yet fully formed, but she was aware of it now, knew of its existence. Almost like finding a growth on your arm that had been there for years, and only in that second noticing one limb is perhaps larger than the other with startling and shocking clarity.
“I was and I wasn’t scared. It was...definitely familiar.” And that brought her back to her nightmares. The familiar darkness, the thing that wrapped around her just as she died, the thing that kicked her out of the dream and woke her. But how could that have been Nathaniel? Her mind wanted to reject all of this, but her eyes fell to the floor as she struggled to bring it all together even though she was still missing a handful of puzzle pieces. Pulling her gaze up from the scrubbed and impeccable tiling beneath their feet, she tried to calm herself. “Yeah, it does seem like I’ve known him. For a really long time. And up until a few months ago, we’d never met. At least, nothing I can place. He’s the only person in the building that I’ve felt that with, though. I just thought...the strange things happening to us...that was just us, our issues, but then I saw you turn into...” Her free hand raised and rubbed at her forehead, as though able to offer succor to her brain through osmosis. Then she dropped it by her side and gave Adam a grateful smile.
“Thanks. I know you probably didn’t want to talk about this, and frankly neither did I...but I think this helped. A lot. And maybe not at all, but, it feels like it did. I’m sorry, I make no sense sometimes.” Swapping her purse to the other hand, she made as though to turn back toward the elevator. “I’m sorry if I’m keeping you from something. Are you headed up, or out...?”
“Up,” he said, gesturing vaguely. “Home for the night, I think.”
He watched her still, seeing plainly the proverbial cogs turning in her mind. It would take time for this to set in as it had with him - as it still did at times, when logic and sanity crept in and made him doubt what he had but slowly come to comprehend.
“You do make sense, Juliet,” he said, his voice hushed and soft. A dark laugh lingered at the edges of his tone, as if he sought comfort in a sort of gallows humor. Laugh to keep from crying, as he had so long been taught. “It’s all this that doesn’t.”
He took a step closer to her, his hands sliding into his pockets. “You know, I don’t mind talking about it. I know it’s weird, but I think it did help, and does help, to know you’re not alone.” He quirked a smile, boyish and almost abashed. “I’m in five-oh-four if the mood ever strikes. Send me a message on the forum or just c’mon up. Okay?”
The grin was mega-watt bright, even though the sleepiness from before was starting to settle in. Despite the topic of conversation, Juliet always felt like she could sleep for a year and still feel tired.
“I’m in eight oh two. And thanks - I don’t know too many people here, yet, but I think that’s my fault, since I’m so busy. I was headed to an appointment, but I’m already late... I think I’m just going to head back up as well. If you don’t mind me sidling in on your elevator ride.” Without waiting for a response, she turned to move herself back toward the elevator and tapped the call button. Just being able to talk to someone brought a huge degree of normalcy back to what she had always considered an abnormal life (though, come to think on it, she never really knew any different).
Adam joined her in the car, a soft smile accompanying his answering nod. Her company - while brief - was pleasant, and their conversation had seemed to further the bond their battle had begun. The ride to his floor passed in amicable small talk, and they parted with a muted wave, each left to their own roiling thoughts.