deercountry | Someone Kick Me Out of My Mind [L Lawliet, Open]

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Someone Kick Me Out of My Mind [L Lawliet, Open]

Who: Lazarus Sauveterre (L Lawliet) and YOU
What: Dreamwalking!
When: Following the events of Fated Leviathan, where most of the people he's on good terms with perished. He's playing the odds and trying to find a way, in dreams, it all could have turned out better, or at least with a lower death count.
Where: His body is technically in Cassandra, but for roughly the first week in March, your dreams are fair game. Either that or choose one of my starters, no harm no foul. I worked hard on them!
Content Warnings: Drug use to induce sleep, intentional evasion from detection while on sleep drugs. Various probable types of dream-violence and disturbing scenarios, including tiger attacks, environmental exposure, and nuclear detonation and fallout. If new prompts bring new content I'll update this.

[It was astonishing. It was visceral, and horrific, and then it was over. The carnage and receding waves were quiet enough, but there was a roaring in the ears of the survivors, or maybe it just sounded that way to the man who was perfect at his job in every way and still failed to keep those he tried to protect from death.

He leaves his things, taking only the clothes on his back and his anxiously bobbing orca whale omen with him when he starts off at a brisk pace toward Trench from the ruined aftermath of the beach's battle. He wants distance from it, and his steps take him to Cassandra, where he takes care to ensure that he's able to sneak into the Pale Sanctuary and conceal himself to swallow a fistful of herbs, and fall, and slumber and brace and dream in the way that he can take hold of the power he couldn't, there on the beach when the fighters were falling.

The tents are in their rows, the waves rear toward the sand. The players are arranged like chess pieces before him, and he can nudge Paul one way, Chara another, playing with Palamedes or Kaworu. They are just pieces, just pawns, but the arrangement could make all the difference, in the end.

The waves crash; the pawns die. L scrabbles in the sands of the dream, forgiving and elastic, rearranging them and bringing everyone back.]

Again!

[And there they are, back, affable and fierce in different measures. Yuri has made cake; Gideon is training by the waves.

More die, this time, including those that L saw alive and well when he left. Among them, a certain orange-haired and cheerful volleyball player is lying motionless and pale on the blood-stained sand.]

Again!

[This time, he moves his position. This time, many of the same die, and he does, as well, a casualty to shrapnel piercing through the tent.]

Again...

[And so it goes, for a hundred, a thousand iterations. L is tireless and determined, but some resource is waning, and his omen tugs at him, concerned for his sanity.]

No, Lycka, I...!

[She knows better, as she tends to in cases like these. Her jaws pull him by his jacket from his own dream into another, and this is where his fixations end, and something else entirely begins.

Who are you? What are your dreams like? If this Paleblooded, lost soul has chanced into your unconscious visions, what might he find, as his body languishes in Cassandra and his omen picks up the pieces of his fragmented mind?]

1. The Wild Jungle

[The air around you is heavy and humid. Unseen in the dense bush, the circle of life is rapid and repellent. Thrums and screeches announce the arrival of swift death, in various measures that one might or might not notice. A jaguar's kill, the soft extinguishment of a beetle, and they all weave themselves into the teeming tapestry that surrounds you in this quintessential rainforest.

You might be standing to fight, or running away. It doesn't matter, because a thin man with shaggy, dark hair who looks wide-eyed and younger than he should is beside you, closer than either of you want. He hands you a blunderbuss, an old weapon with a flared muzzle.]

The infrasound is what does it; the tiger is the voice darker than night.

[And, in fact, a growl chills and freezes you, splitting your chest asunder with a sound so low that your ears don't register it, but the atoms of your body react with cold, foreboding dread.]

2. The Stormy Desert

[A crack of thunder splits the sky above you before you've managed to recognize your dream's locale. You might hope for rain; so do the scorpions and long-tailed mice, the snakes in their dens and the cacti in their proud and stoic stature.

It won't rain. You can wish, and cry, and curse, but only the thunder will growl and thrash. The lightning may strike, so watch your head; stay low to the sand and find shelter if you can.

If you do, along the side of a cliff facing the west where the sun set rosy before the clouds rolled in, there is a young man with sunburned cheeks. His eyes are red, as though he's been staring at the sun, or it's been raining somewhere private and inward.]

I've been collecting scorpion venom. What for, I don't remember. But I have so much. What's the point of finding a cure when everyone is already dead?

3.The Grimy City

[The crowds are mostly faceless; when they aren't, they're grotesque, likely to sport the visages of rats or roaches rather than anything remotely humanlike. They actively shove you and trip you, doing their best to jostle you toward the entrance of a subway, and no matter how strong you are the impulse is incredibly difficult to resist.

You walk (or tumble) down the subway stairs. The tollbooth is manned by a young man with unruly dark hair, who seems determined to hear his headphones in spite of your desire to gather the attention of the one human-seeming creature in this dream.]

What? No, I can't hear you. Speak louder, please, I'm losing you!

4.The Nuclear Wasteland

[A brilliant flash lights the daytime sky; you might be blinded, or perhaps you had the good fortune to blink at the time. A roiling cloud rises in the sky, top-heavy and triumphant, blossoming into boiling and dusty vapor that will fall back to earth and condemn everything still living.

Perhaps you're staggering. Perhaps you're already feeling the fallout on your hair and shoulders. Perhaps you are sitting, forlorn and accepting, as the sirens blare and the screams fade. Regardless, someone has seized you bodily by your upper arms, hauling you into a shelter, spinning the vault's circular lock and wrapping you in a desperate embrace.]

I'm so glad. I thought you were lost... I thought I was the only one left.

[And he holds you, and holds you, with those frail and thin arms that clutch with the strength that only a dying or very guilty man might possess.]

V. Wildcard

[What did you dream about? If L is there, let me know and prompt this option to the moon and stars!]

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[For a moment, a split second, it's a slender and alien girl (fangs-feathers-talons) that L's rescued and pulled into his bunker. She stares at him with wide red eyes, a fluttering suggestion of moth wings and curling appendages behind her.

Then he's clutching an Omen to his chest, a familiar chimera who fists her six little feet into his rumpled shirt and warbles reassurance to him. He's squashing her, but she's made of smoke and flexible as a cat and this is all right, it's all right, he's not alone.]

Edited 2022-03-08 22:54 (UTC)

[He scarcely sees who he's taken hold of, scarcely registers that she already looks otherworldly. L's started to lose himself in snatches and waves as his dreamwalking takes him further from his home dream, further from the grounded mind he knows, and the thrumming undercurrent of all of this, the rumble and the roar, is the sound of fear itself.

The detonation at their backs, along with what seems to be wings, he tucks her into the closest thing they have to safety and shelter, breathless, releaseing and getting a decently collected look at her for the first time. With a start, he realizes who she is, and who she belongs to.

Best not to squash her, though she's strong enough to be here, apparently, even after her Sleeper's plunging descent into what he could only assume was a second death.]

If you're here, then where is Moonsight?

[Released though she might be, the Omen doesn't flee from further contact. She flutters only as far as the nearest flat surface and alights on it, staring him straight in the face as he studies her.

The question gets a descending warble from her, a weak feeling of loneliness and abandonment that hovers around preverbal concept. After a moment, she turns her head pointedly toward the dogged bunker door.

He is Out There; he is in the wasteland, in hell, in unreality. She cannot go to him.]

[There's something humbling, always, about being chosen when the tides have turned and left someone truly bereft, alone, and afraid. L sighs softly, watching Iskierka as the bird moth seems to gesture, in her abstract, insectoid way, toward the door he has just sealed them into.]

I think I understand.

[There's a reason he isn't seeing "Moonsight" here, after all. A big reason; a bad reason. He was one of those eaten by the Leviathan, L thinks, but why would his omen be here if that was the case?]

Surviving the next hour is critical, if this follows the typical rules of a nuclear detonation. If we leave now... the radiation in the fallout will probably kill us. I want to find him...

[He adds the latter ruefully. He just doesn't know if it's possible for various reasons.]

Maybe there's a hazmat suit in here.

[He starts opening boxes, rifling through supplies, searching. He wants Illarion's omen to know, at least, that an attempt was made.]

[She launches from her perch as he turns away, two wingbeats and a glide carrying her to land on the next box he comes to before his hand can come down on it. Rearing up, she reaches to put her minuscule palm in the way of his own--don't.

Her Sleeper would not ask someone to go into fatal danger for his sake, whether or not there was a chance of rescue; his chances of "survival" are much higher than one of the living--

And there's not any saving him this way, either.

She gives another admonitory trill, into an apologetic whistle. She is sorry.

(The words on the label she's standing over slowly corrode into unintelligible letterforms, reminiscent of tiny eye-defying text seen so many months ago in another frozen tomb.)]

[He stops at that rather unmistakable signal, both saddened and humbled by the omen's unwillingness to let him help this way. It says something about Illarion, too, that he is indeed more worried about the living and what harm they can come to searching for his safe return.]

I'm sorry, too.

[He murmurs a response; though she didn't voice it, her meaning came through so startlingly clear, it was as though he heard words.]

That...!

[He recognizes the script. He couldn't read it then, but he has tools now that he didn't then, did he?]

I'm going to try something.

[He doesn't cut himself, it's too dangerous with the radiation, but he attempts the language anyway. He focuses on the letters, asking this antique blood language for some edification, anything.]

Solknakhan... Sheffol isk soothvis. Sheffol isk vor nedakana, pana sheffoles krep net karshak. Sheffolchak sechy tisket kala shanna... nemares kocha... skekstet.

[Some Omens are as much people as their Sleepers, puissant and rational and capable of conversation. Iskierka is not one of these; there is only enough soul and emotion between her and her Sleeper to let one of them be a person, and she is so often relegated to a muted slumber. Communication is a struggle--so to be understood so exactly is a novelty. She lifts her antennae, head cocked to one side as she regards this clever child-man her Sleeper already thinks so well of.

I'm going to try something, he says, and she is slow to parse what the downward cast of his eyes means. It takes her seconds into his invocation to realize where he's looking, look down herself, and step off the label as it continues its transformation into something nearer microfiche for all the words in so small a space.

The fabric of the dream resonates with the request like it's been plucked. (Is that low and buzzing hum in the background, bone-conducting, something new? Has it always been there?) Letterforms twist and dance under the influence of low-frequency harmonics, rearranging themselves in cascades.

Slowly, slowly, the noise yields up signal:]

The Throne will sing to you, if you're near enough to see it–

[There's a sharp intake of breath from the Sleeper, found here by chance and given an invaluable piece of a puzzle needed to help Illarion. He murmurs the words, committing them easily to memory, before his eyes return to the bird-moth omen.

No wonder she wouldn't let him venture out again, not when this is the true way to save her Sleeper.]

I understand... or at least, I begin to. I won't let this go to waste, I promise.

[He can even think of at least one prince, offhand.]

I just have to wake up. Probably better that it's sooner.

[She cocks her head at him, antennae high, break gaped enough for a soft and squeaking breath of noise. I understand, he says, and I promise, and while the conditional slips her understanding, she knows the meaning of wake up.

She takes her eyes from him at last, head turned toward the back of the bunker, toward a gaping darkness there. Red eyes flick back once toward his pinched face before she's launched again, winging in the direction of that patch of blackness.

It sings when regarded straight-on, a low undulating note that speaks of something vast and breathing. Iskierka alights in its penumbra, looks back, and trills an invitation: come?]

[L's been peripherally aware of that lurking darkness, trying not to look too long or too indulgently at it. Judging the depth, or measuring the shadows, would mean dwelling and lingering and perhaps even deciding that he belongs there.

He's just lost the only sense of true community he's ever experienced in one fell swoop, and then repeated the process a thousand painful times over to see if anything could have changed. His body and mind are exhausted, ironically, from all the sleep.

Some direction is nice. It could come from a malignant source, and by now he might not notice or care. It's a way out, away from the bunker and the horror aboveground, and one he doesn't have to tax or overextend himself to manage to find.

He nods, answering the invitation with a lackluster but committed OK, stepping towards the shadow, into it, through it alongside Iskierka.]

[They step into the shadow and through.

It is neither darkness or door, not merely, but a starving thing that tears at the soul. A brief bright second of flensing pain hits--like being strained through wires, like being separated from identity-personality-mortal care--and they are out, and the creature leading L is a girl once more. Her parchment-pale skin glows in the utter blackness around them; it illuminates the ground beneath her delicate talons in flashes of carapace and jointed leg and mandible with each careful step.

She is light enough (Omen-light) to glide across the surface of the packed swarm. Heavier steps might sink a crunching quarter-inch into the writhing substrate. Damage provokes them into a frenzy--not at the intruder but each other--an orgiastic burst of cannibalism that sheds its own sickly red glow wherever L treads.

The air is thick with the scream of cicadas and the buzz of locusts, rising high over the Throne-song that beats strongest in bone and muscle. Iskierka follows the thread of its pull, arrow-straight through the dark, and does not turn her head to look at the shapes illumined by her passing. Heaping figures rise and subside, half-glimpsed: A soldier of some huge tusked breed bayoneted by a ragged skeleton--delicate feathered elves like-and-not-like Illarion choking beneath a pall of chlorine gas--a human man with copper-red hair and bloodshot eyes torn to pieces, again and again by the ravening dark.

Join them. Kill. Consume. Give in to the song of war; dance to the beat it calls.]

Edited 2022-03-19 16:05 (UTC)

[L winces, his breath catching; as able and willing as he typically is to endure the emptiest and harshest types of deprivation, his already pared-to-essentials frame and overtaxed mind don't transition well to the other side. Once they've crossed the threshold, his hands are covering his mouth, and he's all wide, staring eyes and shallow, straining breaths.

He follows the girl, stumbling a bit, feeling that he's off the beaten path and struggling for it. But she seems to know the way, and the man who does not trust, ever, for the knowledge that it will result in instant and imminent death, doesn't exactly have another choice. He clings to her by the thread guiding them together, the one that makes his own omen currently inaccessible.

Even when the noise rises to hideous cacophony, his hands stay over his mouth. What if he's a cannibal, too? His feet are careful, but however starved thin he might be, his steps carry weight, and consequences. He wants to look away, all while understanding that he must look where he's stepping, or risk faltering, and falling.]

What...?

[He hears, again, the message, or at least the gist of it, but he's not a soldier, not a fighter. Physically, he's a fragile and bony thing, with something of a child still about him in spite of his adult height and voice. Mentally, he's many times more resilient, but how far can that protect him when he's being assailed or asked to stand and fight?]

I'm not a killer, and I have no desire to consume. Will I die if I don't?

[If he dies here, or sustains comparable injuries, he knows there's a good
chance that the psychic damage that translates to will result in his waking-world death. This is pertinent information if he can secure it.]

[Come. Fight. Kill. Suffer. Die.

There is an overwhelming, smothering sense of Presence in the writhing dark--the feeling of sharing a room with another being hideously magnified a hundred thousand times. Except what is Present, what Speaks, is so far beyond personhood as L understands it that no conversation is possible. Will I die if I don't? he asks, and the writhing swarm beneath his feet, the Song that calls to the brainstem, the Presence that perfuses them all answer: All will kill. All will die.

An instance of the red-haired man erupts in L's path, corona-in-oilslick eyes rolling in his head, mouth working--HELP ME--before he's torn to pieces again. Dunes and hillocks of writhing bodies heave around him, throwing up great rows of tombstones, tumescent piles of skulls.

Distantly, the one other person here--the fractional person--the beacon leading L through the red-washed blackness hears him speak and stops. She turns back (it is all she can do; she cannot walk back against the call of the Throne) and holds her feathered arms wide, awaiting his approach. (Nothing hinders him yet except the sucking shifting devouring sink of substrate beneath his feet; the chitin is sharp, it may pierce, but they do not turn on him yet.

Not yet.)

She will embrace him as he reaches her, and cup taloned hands over his too-small shell-like ears. don't listen. she expresses. walk.

Behind her, unnoticed--her small capacity for attention is fixed on him--the floor undulates, insects draining away like the ominous outgoing tide before a killing wave.

Something looms in the distance, texture more than shadow in the dark, arching high and starred with blood-red pinprick stars of consumption.]

Edited 2022-03-20 17:51 (UTC)

[The words change, somewhat, but the message, focused and intense, remains utterly the same. It's so thoroughly sure that it wants suffering and death that L can't help but wonder if he wants it, to, so that he can repeat something to someone else with such certainty.

There's a kind of comfort to the repetition of the locusts. There's a kind of comfort to knowing that one is right, and feeling it in one's bones (or exoskeleton). The certainty, and the peace of acceptance to follow, and for a moment his steps start to falter.

He might even take a moment to kneel on the teeming ground, but the sudden eruption of the red-haired man sends him reeling back, compensating with his balance in the other direction entirely. His hands curl against his chest in shock and revulsion; he doesn't reach out to help, and by the time it occurs to him, the man has already vanished.

It takes real willpower to move forward, but acceptance quails in the face of that kind of pain and death. He treads gently and with no small amount of trepidation towards Iskierka's open arms, because certainty, now, is probably the only thing that can get them through, or at least pretty staunch confidence. Perhaps the fact that she is merely a part of something whole allows her to guide with as much, and he allows the embrace, resting his head against shoulder, or carapace.

He doesn't listen. He wears her like a pair of earmuffs, and walks. He keeps his eyes wide open; as unpleasant as the sights and the skulls and the tombstones are, amid writhing masses of endless deadly consumption, the sound of that voice is so much worse. The sight allows him to keep walking, in fact motivates him to walk even faster so that more locusts are behind him post-haste.

He feels that something is changing behind him, and starts to turn to look... but the horizon before him demands his attention. His breath catches, and those stars stand out vibrant red in the liquid dark of his eyes.]

Omen?

[He's never been told Iskierka's name, and it feels wrong to use Lycka's, even if it comes the most naturally to him.]

[She is light enough--ghost-light, rag-light--she can be worn; he can advance, while her insubstantial form feathers and flows around him in bright streamers. The path ahead needs no guidance now that he has the knack of walking it, the hook-in-the-heart of the Throne's song guiding him surely. She can keep her eyes on his, watch his faces for signs of wavering, distress, deviation--

For red reflected stars in his eyes. Omen? he asks, and she cranes her too-long neck back to regard what comes for them in an inverted angle. She considers what she is seeing for almost too long, as it crests and foams and begins to break.

Then all around them is feather and mothscale and filament as her wings erupt, more than she should have, and she clutches him to her chest in an infolding gesture like closing a luminous cocoon.

A drowning wave of insects falls on them with both force and malice behind it. The pale thin aegis of feather protects against both crushing and submersion, buoying them up--but now the locusts begin to chew.]

Edited (redundancy fix) 2022-03-21 05:18 (UTC)

[L has been unable to partake in much of popular culture in his world, but for a moment as he walks, he is struck uncannily by the feeling that he is Ebenezer Scrooge, wreathed in the gentle arms and ethereal wisp of the Ghost of Christmas Past. And is that not appropriate, for the Omen of one long dead, even if L himself scarcely fits his imagined role with no wrinkles, gray hair or stocking cap?

The locusts roil underfoot, but do not trip him. This much, he can do; this much is going well, better, in fact, than much of this fraught dreamwalking experiment has.

Red-flecked, though, he stares, and starts to falter. Red-flecked, his eyes don't immediately go to Iskierka as she reacts; they're fixed forward, instead, in the direction she too is looking. He snaps out of it and starts looking for a way to save them, some pattern to cling to and use, but she's faster, cocooning and sheltering his scrawny body.

There's are sounds of protests, almost wordless, almost without language entirely, and L realizes after a second that he's the one making them.]

Omen!

[A word, at least, and he can hear the sound of mandibles snipping and pulping grotesquely far too close to his ears.]

Omen...

[This time it sounds vaguely like begging, and it's not for Iskierka to give more than she already has. He's calling what's lost, and sorely needed. She's coming? He thinks he can feel Lycka coming, but maybe it's the delusion of hope after all the exhaustion and fear and doubt.]

[He does not ask Iskierka to give more than she already has, and yet she gives. What else is left to the dead but their service to the living, whether as aegis or food, whether as warning or lesson?

Omen... L calls, not to her but his own, yet she hears, and she hears. The locusts will chew through her ragged wings in a second more, and she will not let them. Thin-fingered insect-jointed arms wrap around L and Iskierka warps, Iskierka grows into something vast and feathered and unbearably bright in the dark.

The locusts still chew, but they must now chew through massed feather and skin and muscle and bone and eyes and ~~eyes~~ thick as three men, to get at the precious burden she holds cradled against the down of her chest. A basso warble rumbles from her fanged maw; it does not deter their attackers, but perhaps some deep fundamental note carries to the lost part of L's soul, braided with the detective's own call. help. come.

Somewhere that is not Trench--that is not anywhere at all, for Throne-space is space out of space and time out of time even when it is not wrapped into a self-singular bubble made out of one man's stories--Illarion staggers and falls beneath another tide of insects.

They feast.]

Edited (redundancy fix I'm so sorry) 2022-03-23 04:43 (UTC)

[There's no feeling like being truly and utterly helpless to protect oneself and one's companion. L knows what it's like; he'd watched Watari fall, and then himself fallen, knowing that he would, knowing that there was nothing he could do.

Iskierka still has something she can do, and as he curls more tightly in her wings and the chewing gets louder, she does it, increasing in mass and turning a lettuce leaf into a banquet for the ravenous locusts. Iskierka's call thrums through his chest, and something else connects there, rushing, charging. Lycka breaks through whatever barrier had separated them before, nudging unsqueamishly through Iskierka's tattered remains and retrieving her dreamer.

He clings, and doesn't stop clinging.]

[What remains of Iskierka parts like a rent veil as Lycka rejoins her Sleeper; what remains of the vision of another space-that-isn't-space comes apart at the seams and the wing-roots. Fluttering bits of locust fritter away into the dark and the cold between dreams, and all's still and silent for a moment.

Then from glitter and milk-white traces of torn pneuma, Iskierka reforms in her accustomed shape. Nothing comes with her--a profound and echoing nothing, a transmission cut short. Her Sleeper is nothing, experiencing nothing, and for a moment she is here by herself.

She drifts to L and Lycka on feather-and-scale wings, not bothering to beat them, and bumps gently into the pair to ascertain their reality.

safe. she expresses to them both; the lift of her antennae make it a question.]

[Omen death, as well as dream death, is not always completely cut and dried or predictable. As Lycka speeds away with L, he's relieved to see that the end Iskeika has met does not seem to be a permanent one, however grisly it was in the moment.]

Safe...

[He confirms it breathlessly as Lycka circles back, fingertips brushing her antennae as she bumps close.]

[good. A feeling of apology comes with it, richer with regret than her previous expressions. She is a person momentarily, and not an instrument; she recognizes the near-lethal danger in her attempt to help.

It has not gone: The risks of remaining in a dream where the dreamer's died have not changed since Sodder's death. She risks them further by delaying Lycka's flight even this brief moment.

go. wake. Find a better dream than this one--one that does not exit on the mouth of hell.

With that sentiment her tiny light winks out, leaving Sleeper and Omen alone in the black.

---

Where L's body rests fetal-curled in the Pale Sanctuary, tiny insectile hands tuck a folded note into his larger one. A black-tipped beak tidies his scarecrow hair, its owner little caring the act may be in vain.

wake. safe. Iskierka bids him, and flits away through a wall.]

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Someone Kick Me Out of My Mind [L Lawliet, Open]

4, fallout: new trench

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cw: oh, so many insects; insect cannibalism; wartime violence

cw: oh, so many insects; insect cannibalism; wartime violence

cws continue; Throne-space is grody

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cw: character death by insect

cw: character death by insect

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