Re: log; misha and adrian
The place was thought, and it wasn't real, so there was no risk in it. He watched Misha, and listened to the sound of soft feathers rustling.
He still hadn't caught up with himself. That would take time. It was easy to move with Misha's suggestions, and not second-guess what happened in this nowhere place, where no one could be hurt. He thought of his bedroom, just to see if Misha was right, and he was. They went from the empty warm sunrise void to a room, a real one, with walls and a soft, warm bed.
For a moment, the room couldn't decide which bedroom it wanted to be. He hadn't settled into his new apartment. The B&B had been the closest he'd felt to home he'd felt since coming to Repose, and nothing since had settled quite so well. The person he had known lay just on the other side of the wall had something to do with that feeling, back then. He had felt safe, there. Contented, almost.
So the room they stood in was the bedroom at the B&B before it was anything else, spare but cool, with the window across from the bed open wide to the summer air last year. Then the floor was stripped of its plush carpet. It became short and dense, industrial and cream-colored, and the bed was now narrow under a deep-set niche in the wall that glowed with artificial light.
His brow furrowed, and the room was swept clean of furniture again. Now the room was his bedroom in the new apartment, only half-unpacked. He had moved just before the trouble with Patrick and Newt, and he hadn't had the heart to finish yet. The bed was a soft, comfortable haven of blankets. There was no art on the walls. His computer sat closed on the desk near the window, which had no drapes. Boxes were stacked high in the corner, and there was a short pile of books on the nightstand. The bedroom door hung ajar, and through it, the sounds of the apartment next door were just barely audible. Someone was playing a song, a familiar one, on a fiddle.
He took a short step closer to the bed and touched the bedspread to ground himself. He looked up at Misha, wondering a little. "If you're sure," he said. He didn't know what would happen. He hardly knew who or what he was, what he would be. He knew how to keep it caged, but he never drew it out on purpose, never tried to manipulate it once it was fully unleashed. Only Sue understood the Obscurus, and controlled it with brute force and eloquent rage. Did he still have that? Would it still work?
He flicked across memory, and he tried to remember the last thing that had made it strain at its lead. It was frighteningly easy.
The pair appeared on the bed with no fanfare, materializing under Adrian's comforting pile of blankets. They were just kissing - perhaps because Adrian couldn't bring himself, even at his worst, to imagine much more than that. But it was tender. It was sweet. One of the figures was blurrier than the other - one was sharply in focus, his every detail beautifully and accurately observed. The soft fan of his pale eyelashes was perfectly real. The cast of his fingernails was as definite as a sculpture.
When Newt had baited him, weeks ago, he had said much the same thing as Misha - think about it, the thing you most don't want to think about. Imagine it. Every disgusting detail, every torturous moment. Build a vision of the thing you want most receding into the dark.