Repose

What is your major malfunction now?

Eames was dog-tired, darling. The kind of weary dog that trotted for miles to get itself home, which was pathetic and not remotely affecting. It shouldn't have been tremendously hard work. It was after all just one sort of dream, one with a set beginning and an ending. The clinic had baked that up and presented it to the dreamers with the faint surprise of someone expecting praise, colored with a taste of the accusing in its absence. It was the sort of thing only a non-dreamer could decide was less work, darling. Of course it sounded simpler. Plug everyone in, until they were under, a tour around the Capital with a dozen sleeping dreamers and trot out the same fairytale dream that lulled them into contentment.

What wasn't considered was how all those minds - at once, darling - interacted with the set-up. You had dreamers whose sub-conscious was as light and fluffy as fresh-whipped cream and you had those whose minds were a roiling sea, murky with all the bones of memories that could get dragged up. And the dream had to remain somewhat separate, so that the dreamer's mind didn't thrust itself out of the dream entirely. The concoction in the tubes did that to some degree, which is why they were plugged in. But a dreamer who woke, having been kept under was bad for business. The dreamers from the clinic were expected to sustain it. It was like building a structure intended to survive twelve people pulling it apart, out of meringue, light and substantial and easily crushed.

And of course, darling, the dreams were only short. So they did it over and over again, until one dreamer after another sloped off, looking not green but faintly gray like all that was left of them was sinew and bone and all the marrow had been sucked out with the hiss and pump of the patented devices. Eames didn't know the experience of everyone who worked in the clinic. They were kept separately and while their paths could cross, it was inconvenient much of the time which was calculated by the men in suits. He didn't know if everyone had previously dreamed over and over, sustained periods of dreaming that meant you woke thickly, with the sour taste of sleep on your tongue just long enough to drink, to look blearily about you and to slide back under again. If it had been the real world, darling, he would have shuddered at the prospect of dreaming so unguarded, out in the open and so frequently.

But he was done for the day. Awake clung to him greasily, as if it couldn't get a grasp, and Eames sat in the chair beside the check-point for loading up buses with his elbows on his knees and leaning forward until the thick muscle of his back was a curve and his head was a pendulum weight over his knees from the base of his neck. He would stand, in a little bit. It wasn't impossible, he just wasn't trying yet (and he'd defend it as such until his dying breath). He wore unobtrusive clothes, all black: black pants that fitted well and a black shirt and a black reefer coat, none of which looked much like Eames and all of which didn't do much to help the faintly grayish cast to normally florid skin.

In a moment, he pushed himself up from the chair by its arms with a grunt of effort he was embarrassed to have to expend, and he didn't stagger but took three steps and then leaned against the wall nearest that didn't belong to the clinic, or the temporary outlet it had set up.

[Martins]

[She links to an external file hosted on the college server. It's fruit. OK, it's not shit-hot but it's color which is not her thing and it's not ink pen and pencil which is not her thing.]

class is way better than it ever was when I was a kid. how you doing after the shit with the nightmares?

[delivery: Misha B/Damian W]

[She sends it late, because it was meant to go before the nightmares locked the town down when the guy who'd run the class had posted the recipe on Instagram or something. So she sends halwa in a tin that looks like it held super-cheap candy bought over Christmas. Holly sticks a note on the front, a square of art-book paper and the scrawl is black ink in thin artist-nib pen, 'I don't think I screwed this up. H']

[Newt P]

hey. are you OK?

[Destiny S]

[because Destiny is clearly back in town.] soo. you're back?

[Patrick G]

[Similarly, because Patrick is clearly gone.] uh, hey, is everything OK?

[Public]

I heard the weirdest story last night and I think I want to believe it's true.

[Locked to Mary M]
I've [...] somewhat of an odd request.