Pete Wisdom is saving the world...from itself. (mister_wisdom) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2012-06-27 06:16:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, neena thurman (domino), pete wisdom |
"Stoppit, wote'er you're doing, this instant."
Who: Domino, Pete Wisdom
What: Aftermath of the dream 'fun', which, you can find them (warning labels apply to both sequences), Here (Domino's happy fun medical terror town) and Here (Petey's happy fun picnic day with cultists). Also? Awesome boxers.
When: Morning time.
Where: Domino's bolthole
Rating: PG13, language, 'food poisoning' & brain melt happens.
Status: Complete!
There was a place with white walls and to be honest, as consciousness managed to crawl its way through the place and burn it all away with the light of day, Domino had awoken with the clear impression that she was still living in it.
It might have been better if she'd woken up in her old apartment, where the walls had been painted some other color in an effort to bring her back to the present. But here, in the bolthole she'd taken cover in, the walls were white plaster with cracks running down them, and all she remembered was her final thought, She wanted it all to end.
Her skin crawled and there was a man in her bed again, and this time, she swore to whatever God she used to worship, that she was going to escape. Such was her train of thought as she rolled backwards off the bed, ducked for cover, and started trying to crawl out of the bedroom and into the hallway. Everything hurt, but pain was a small price to pay for freedom.
The bed's remaining occupant was currently in a cold sweat. It had nothing to do with a fever, or being ill, or even being drunk. He tossed and turned, feeling as though several flying bugs were landing on him, that something terrible had crawled up his nose...a smell...of all things rotten and decaying...and all he could hear was a horrible sucking noise, over and over again. It was like some horrific thing relentlessly gasping for air. Air that could never get into lungs, because those lungs weren't even there to begin with.
Or maybe it was the sound of his own breathing, because the minute that he heard anything scuffling about in the room, he gasped loudly as though he'd forgotten how to breathe. He sat upright so quickly, the sheet was fluttering up fitfully and floating serenly back down like a drifting veil. It would've been a lovely sight, if not for the fact that one of Pete's hands slapped over his mouth as he made a very chunky choking sound, and he went running in a mad dash for the bathroom.
He almost tripped over something on the way there, giving it a nudging aside with his foot like it needed to get the hell out of his way, before he ran in, dropped his hand away, and promptly started to vomit directly into the bathroom sink.
To hell with the toilet. The sink was the first thing he could reach, before it started to come out his nose.
The thing Pete almost tripped over was more than happy to get out of his way, still trapped in a world where everything was bad and white was bad and god there were tiles on the floor. She quickly checked to see if they were black and white or green and cream, torn between the two different places and unsure which one would actually be any better.
Thankfully, the tiles were neither sets of colors, instead some worn and dingy brown. A wave of relief washed over her then, especially when the man who had run past her hadn't stopped to turn her in, hurt her, touch her, or drag her anywhere. She could hear noises in the bathroom, but since they weren't angry shouts, she just kept right on crawling, counting the tiles on the floor as she went.
There was an uneven amount of them before she hit the kitchen, which luckily had some kind of cracked yellow linoleum for flooring, and set up camp underneath the table. She wanted to make sure it was clear and the surroundings were getting less and less familiar. It occurred to her that in either place, she'd never seen the door out, and started to shake with panic.
Pete was still somewhere between trying to get air into his lungs and emptying the contents of his stomach, entirely. Soon, things seemed to settle down into dry heaves and watering eyes, enough that he could grip the sides of the sink with both hands and brace himself so he didn't end up down on the floor. It felt like the planet's gravity was trying to pull him down in that direction, and so it took every bit of strength he had left after an epic puke fest, to remain upright.
That smell, that smell of rotting, still felt like it was up in his nose. He started trying to rinse the sink out, enough that everything went down the drain as he watched with a numb expression. Then it was time to rinse his mouth out, and try to snort some cold water up his nose in a last ditch effort to make it stop.
That didn't work so well. It burned. Probably from all the fluoride or chlorine or whatever the great blazes the government dropped into its public water supply to keep everyone from outright killing one another and continuing to vote for a two party, trickle-down economics system.
Mouthwash? Toothpaste? Whatever he could find, he was using in copious amounts. That was all while trying to think of something...anything...to get the things that he had seen while he was asleep, out of his head.
That was when he remembered he had used his foot to move someone out of his way. And that someone could only be one person. If she'd been crawling out of the room like she must have been, then Dom would've crawled through the remains of the broken glass trap and...someone hadn't vacuumed yet. That someone was him. Because housecleaning, to him, was a notoriously bottom rung priority.
"Oh. Bugger. Neena." That got his mind off his own problems, really quick. He had to make sure at least, that his sweeping job on the broken glass had been good enough, so that she wasn't going to have several little cuts and scrapes over her hands and knees. He would probably have a few on his feet, if he had to do a full search of the place to find where she'd crawled off to. No time for shoes, though. He had to act. Now.
Quick check? The front door was still locked and barricaded. If he'd dreamed something bad, too, then she must've had something terrible again as well. There wasn't any paint there, either. This could get messy.
He proceeded with caution down the hallway, past the bedroom, wearing only a t-shirt and his boxers with bowls of petunias and happy faced whales printed on them, toward the kitchen area. This time, he was careful not to trip over anyone on the way, and he was watching where he was going.
Cuts and scrapes on her hands and knees? She wasn't even sure she felt them. Was she in the place where she couldn't make a sound? Was she in the place where she screamed and no one cared? Where was the door? Why did everything hurt? Where was the DOOR? Why hadn't anyone come to find her yet? Where were all the doctors? WHERE WAS THE DOOR?
She ran her hands up into her hair and closed her eyes, trying to think. Trying to imagine the place, either places, they had to have been two different places, in her head. There had to be a door. There had to be a place that lead to somewhere else. Maybe a door she never went through. Maybe a door that she watched people go into and never return.
He mind filled with pictures of various doors, but she couldn't think of a single one that lead anywhere but rooms with black and white tiles, or rooms with green and cream tiles. Where was she NOW? What if one of the doors LEAD to a room with either color of tile? I'm not going back there, I'm not going back there, I'm not going back there...
It was easy to find her once he followed the faintest little pink and red smudges across the kitchen tile, while doing a tapdance of his own and making terrible ouch faces. The glass worked, at least, as a sound trigger for anyone walking on the floor with shoes, and as a pain deterrent to anyone who tried to sneak in barefoot. The problem was, it worked a little too well.
The other problem was that Domino looked like she was ready to either rip her hair out, or claw her way through a wall to get out of there. If it was more of that white walls dream that she mentioned before? Things were probably going to require more...caution...than he knew how to proceed with. Caution definitely wasn't one of his strong points, even though sneaking wasn't beyond him. Too bad it seemed he only used his stealth to maneuver around, to get close in for a killing.
He wasn't even sure how he killed anyone, but the word 'mutant' stuck in his head from the dream, for a moment. At least it wasn't 'vampire' said by a perpetually blank faced and monotone girl, to her glittery boyfriend. He might just puke a little in his mouth again, at that thought.
First Priority: Make sure that Thurman hadn't gone so nutters, she needed the nice young men to show up with a straightjacket, and they're coming to take her away, ha ha, to the funny farm, where life was beautiful all the time....
All right. Pete cut himself off at the pass there. He went kneeling down under the table until he was beside her, and staring at her with a deeply worried expression on his face. Touching her was likely a very bad idea, so he kept his voice as low and calm sounding as he could, like he was talking to a frightened animal or child, to tell them that everything was okay and they could come out from under the kitchen sink, look here at this plushie bear or doggie treat...don't bite me, please...
"Neena," he began, each word spoken with the greatest of care, "you're not in the white walled place, if that's wot you're worried about right now. All right, luv? Bolthole. Safehouse. You're in one. C'mon, give me a looking at and nod if you understand wot I've just told you."
I'm not going back there, I'm not going back there, I'm not... I'm not... I'm not... I'm not going, you can't make me, you can't make me...
The words ran through her head repeatedly for several more seconds, nearly drowning out his voice. She clapped her hands over her ears to try and stop the thoughts from making sounds in her head repeatedly like that, as if she didn't realise that it was her own train of thought she was trying to make silent. No amount of ear-grabbing was going to stop that.
She started counting the repetitions of the phrase as it ran through her head, then, a coping mechanism she'd obviously developed at some point in the past to save herself from going completely and utterly insane. It was too bad for Pete, though, that she certainly looked like she was still heading there.
After all, the only response to his words was that she'd started rocking in place a bit, and her mouth was moving like it was trying to say something. Only no sounds actually came out. If he'd ever learned to read lips in this life or the previous one, he'd probably be able to figure out that she was counting off the repetitions by mouthing the numbers.
All right, well...Thurman had lost it. That much, he was certain of. It helped, though, for him to concentrate on her, so that he wasn't running back to the nearest rubbish bin, sink, or toilet, to continually dry heave at the thought of what he'd dreamed about. The problem now, was how to get her out of this rut without ripping her stitches, or making the trauma worse.
The problem with that, was that he had no experience on how to do so. That left him with only one option. Wing it. He'd have to make do, as carefully as possible.
With that in mind, he tried again to speak to her, in the hopes that maybe if he spoke louder then she might hear him past...whatever it was that was going on. Then, if he could get her back into bed, he could give her one of her pain pills, let the fuzzy relaxation set in, calm her down, and maybe start to try to make some sense of it. If she was even willing to say anything about it.
"Neena. Aww, fuck it. THURMAN. DOM. DOMMY." He spoke in that tone of voice that usually had people snapping to or paying attention, because he sounded snippy and like he had something that was worth saying. "Look at me. Now. Stoppit, wote'er you're doing, this instant. M'not having it. M'not letting you go stark raving nutter butters. Understood?"
He scowled and watched and waited for a response. Hopefully it was a positive one. The next step would be, if he had to, trying to give her a poke or a pat on the shoulder or...a hug to keep her from lashing out and injuring her leg more...or something. So he hoped at least this might get through to her, before he had to resort to more drastic measures.
Neena? Thurman? Dom? Dommy? Had anyone in that place ever mentioned a name to call her? No one in that place ever called her by a name, but those were names. Those were her names. She remembered her names. The voice was angry and demanding and managed to cut through her thoughts, which had stopped racing a few moments after she'd started counting them off.
It was also very familiar, somehow. Why would a voice take any time to talk to her or call her by name if it was going to hurt her again? The men in the other places didn't bother with conversation. Maybe she was safe. Maybe the floors were different because she'd finally escaped that place.
She pulled her hands off of her ears and ran them back through her hair again, then cracked an eye open in an attempt to see if it was safe.
Her eye came across Pete's familiar face, and locked with his.
"That's my girl," Pete was saying to her in a much softer tone of voice, the second that she was staring at him with some form of recognition registering again. "Oh, c'mere, you...."
He instantly pulled her into a hug, both arms wrapped around her, to keep her very still and give her another moment to get herself together some more. That way, once she was able to speak again, he could assess the damage, and maybe get a look at how scraped up she was.
Note to self moment: Maybe the glass wasn't such a great idea, seeing as how she's already jumped out a window and they'd both been cut up by it. They really didn't need help hurting themselves with more glass at this rate, did they?
That was something he'd fix, as soon as he could determine if she was all right or not. For now, though, he was simply holding onto her, being careful of her leg, and slowly and soothingly rubbing a hand over the middle of her back, between her shoulderblades, to keep her calm.
In a valiant effort to help get her out of the rest of her funk, he whispered in such a hushed voice that it might be missed, "Want me t'grab your arse an' make it all better, by irritating you?"
"NO. No. No. Please, no." Oh there was her voice again, at least, and she could use her words, and her words said no. No meant no, and she could actually say it, so she couldn't have been stuck in that other place. He was still hugging onto her and she decided that was okay at least, because he smelled very familiar, too. Especially with the addition of the vomit smell.
It was about right there that she realised that she was curled up in her kitchen with Pete Wisdom, who was treating her like an escaped mental patient. One of these days, he was going to bring all of these moments of hers up in company over drinks, and she was going to be forced to kill him for it.
Hopefully that day didn't come anytime soon, though.
She snuggled into the hug a bit, and eventually relaxed to the point where she decided it was okay to hug onto him, in return. Then she rested her head against his shoulder, and went searching to make sure she still had a voice, "So I feel like an idiot..."
He probably would bring them up, but only in private, and never in a public setting. This sort of situation was serious business, and he knew it. She was also one of the scant, special few people on the planet that he wouldn't harass by making fun of them like that. Anyone else who wasn't on the special privileges list, was shit out of luck.
As for that vomit smell? It was faint! He'd squirted half her tube of toothpaste in his mouth and swished it around, and even used his finger to scrub around and scratch at his tongue to make the bad taste go away. He hadn't bothered putting the cap back on, either. That's not the way he rolls. It was also a minor miracle that his stomach hadn't rolled over yet and he wasn't off puking, all over again. But he was really trying to push all of that out of his mind, and was...ironically....relieved he could help her and concentrate on her, for the moment. It was easier. He didn't have to deal with his own stuff. That's what alcohol and chainsmoking was for. To squash it all.
Speaking of squishing things related to bad memories, he pressed his face down into that spot where shoulder and neck met and inhaled the scent of her, over and over again. Finally, after at least one full minute of doing that, he dared to speak again.
"...you're not an idiot," he told her quite plainly. "You've simply remembered summat very bad, but it's not now. Got that? Now, you're here, and I'm not going t'let anything happen to you. Just like you wouldn't let anything happen t'me. So m'going to help you back to the bed...clean up your scrapes, give you a pain pill...and you're going t'go back into happy fuzzy land, and probably watch a whole lot more Dr. Phil again."
"It wasn't now, but it was then, I think," She said, her voice a bit absent as she started to sort through things and file them away. There'd been memories of a place where her skin wasn't white. She pulled away from him a bit and looked down at her own arms, which weren't white, either, then blinked her eyes as recognition set in.
She was suddenly starting to understand why she hated hospitals and doctors so very much. The memories had somehow intertwined themselves, but one set of them had definitely happened. She didn't want to think about that anymore. And she definitely didn't mention it again. Instead, she furrowed her brow and looked back at him, "Wait, I think ... there were noises. Are you alright?"
"I am. Touch of food poisoning," he replied with the casual shrug of a shoulder, to dismiss the whole thing, entirely. Quick, easy, painless. Everything rolled off him, like water off a duck's back. Or the way flesh fell off faces, if left long enough in an upright position.
There was a hard swallowing sound and he knew it came from his own throat. That was the reason Pete smirked, his lips pressed tightly together, dimples in his cheeks, his eyes bright and watery, like that damn food poisoning was so pesky, it might be rearing it's ugly head again.
To get his mind off it, he took hold of one of her hands and looked it over, grateful the scrapes were minor and no major cuts were there. Grateful, also, that the bleeding was red and fresh, and not old and decayed.
So much so, in fact, that he held her hand very carefully, raising it up, and gave her a fleeting kiss against her inner arm, intent on kissing it all better.
She watched him kiss at her arm, then looked him in the eye with an expression which could only be summed up as dubious. If she'd just gone back to her obviously extremely traumatizing childhood again, then whatever he'd seen in his sleep was probably just as bad. She remembered the first time she'd dreamed about things, he'd dreamed about his mother's death. He'd never mentioned that until he'd felt the need to, on his own. She wasn't about to badger him.
"Maybe you should get back to bed," was what she ended up saying, while trying to pull herself up onto her own feet. It kind of sounded and looked like he was about to be sick again, too, and she definitely didn't want him throwing up on her, "Do you need a bucket? Apple juice? Tea? Do I even have any tea? ... Peppermint works sometimes, there might be some candies in one of my bags..."
"No...don't think I can stomach anything much, at the moment. Cheers, though. It'll pass, sooner or later." He ended up helping her up, although, maybe, they needed the mutual support. He was feeling a little clammy again. Swallowing several times and taking deep breath cleared that up enough, that the wave of nausea could pass. "Let's get you back into bed. I'll take it easy today. Promise. Only one bottle of whiskey on an empty stomach, and two packs of cigarettes, minimum."
One arm slipped around her again, to offer the same sort of support he'd been giving her, before. To help her keep the weight off her leg, of course. And...into the bedroom he's leading her, out of kitchen areas where food lives, because the thought of food wasn't going to happen until later. At least that evening, when he moaned and groaned drunkenly that he was starving to death and could eat a cow, even if it was still alive and mooing.
"All right! Into bed you go. There's your apple juice and 'ere is your pills, m'dear." He was half tempted to take one himself, but there was too much a risk of it backing up out of his esophagus.
Domino sat on the bed and looked up at him, still extremely worried and not bothering to hide it. She had, after all, just had some kind of stark raving nutter butters breakdown that involved hiding under her kitchen table, so it wasn't like he hadn't seen her in her more vulnerable moments.
"You really don't look good. I know you're sick all the time these days, but... listen, don't take care of me today. Just take care of you. ... and I'm not really sure how Whiskey is going to help your stomach issues, honestly."
In fact, she got right back up out of bed again, handed him the remote, and motioned towards the bed like he better get right into it, himself, "You can even have the remote this time, because I un-love you so much that I'm willing to recognize that you have a penis and therefore own remote rights."
"There's nothing on...wait, wot're you doing there? WOT ARE YOU DOING?" he asked her, loudly, as she went all handy and pointy and he had sat down on the bed and she wasn't on it, at all. "Oh no. No, I'm not having this. You get your arse in this bed, right now."
He wasn't sure he could tolerate a drink at the moment, though the thought of a pain pill and whiskey combo wasn't striking him as quite so bad. Might temporarily put him out of his misery, provided he could eat something. Maybe he'd try that later, when food sounded more appetizing again.
"I'm fine, really. Stop worrying." He reached over and patted his hand down on the bed, looking very worried about her, instead. "I don't want you up an' about after you went crawling around like that. Your leg's going to fall right off. Just rest for a while, I'll hoover the rest of that glass up, shag you senseless so all the bad things go away, eat, sleep, check in, read e-mails, blah blah blaaaaaaaah."
At least someone was back to his usual sarcastic self. Or so it seemed.
"Oh no. There will be no shagging anyone senseless today, Mr. I think Doctor Whiskey is a real medical professional," She shook her head. Her tone was her usual cheeky one, and it was impossible to tell if she was turning the thought of a shag down because of a bad dream, or out of worry. It was probably both.
She folded her arms, "I'm getting you a bucket, and you're going to stay there and feel better and rest. You have food poisoning, that isn't a laughing matter. I don't care how worried you are that my leg is going to fall off, my leg isn't vomiting or looking like hell. So you're going to STAY THERE, and I'm going to help you, and sweep up the glass off my floor myself, and you can watch copious amounts of Dr. Phil while trolling the valar net. Because that's what's happening today."
And with that, she hobbled out of the bedroom, to go get him a bucket, like the rest of the morning - and indeed, the entirety of last evening - had never really happened. He could shout at her all he wanted, but she was going to tie him DOWN to the bed if she had to, and he could just take it.
He'd probably enjoy it.
He would. He'd probably say 'yes, please' if she even brought it up.
"We have a HOOVER," he abruptly shouted, like that was the only way he could find to correct her or get a word in edgewise, because she was being snarky again and decidedly un-wifey at him.