Re: [quicklog: louis d/jean g]
[He took the water from her with quiet thanks, cracking it open and drinking a good quarter of it. He was thirstier than he'd thought - when was the last time he'd eaten?
The beginning. He took a short breath, looking up at her.] I don't think it's related. Only that this place...singles out those who have already been somehow touched by the strange. [Distant as he was from himself, the thought of that time sent a shiver down his spine.
The lights overhead went strangely pale - not a flicker, but a thinning of the light. Then it was rich, full yellow again, incandescent as before.]
I was...taken by a group of people who worshipped a dead god. They offered me to it as a vessel. Of sorts. [He swallowed.] They took...my soul. From me. And then let the god use me as a door to the world. [He looked down, past his hands, through the floor, it seemed.] Someone helped me close it off, and to get my soul back, which was kind. But people died.
[If he hadn't been so separated from emotional immediacy or consequences, perhaps this would have felt like a very dangerous thing to tell a stranger. But he was so open and so apart from what might go wrong that he almost didn't consider how badly it could turn. Now that he was talking, it simply spilled out of him - things he hadn't said to anyone.]
My brother was seeing a woman who was trapped by a terrible door. We went in after her. It was...she didn't - we all had a difficult time. But she was...violated, and her eyes were taken from her. And my sister was there, and I have no idea what she saw, but I'm afraid she may have gone back to drugs. And my brother to the bottle, and god knows what else. I came back through the door with them, and we took this woman to the hospital. I only wanted to go home. Just to go home.
[The words were now a fractured flow. He shouldn't have said any of this. He hadn't been frank with Sam about it - why be frank with a complete stranger?
The next section, though, was obviously more difficult to relate.] I was in an accident. With a woman. In a room, off the subway. She asked for my help - she - [Then it broke off, without words, just the white and the cold heat, and being stretched through a billion on billion seconds, being torn across threads of data a hundred thousand miles long, being undone. He couldn't speak of that, of what had happened. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out, so he shut it again, and looked down into his lap, fiddling with the cap of his water bottle. His voice sounded strange to himself, thin and choked.] I don't know. I don't want anything else. I don't know.