hadriel_logs | Event Log: Dreamwalker

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Event Log: Dreamwalker

Who: Everyone!
What: The Dreamwalker event
Where: In your comfy bed and your sleepy head.
When: May 16th-26th
Warnings: Good dreams, weird dreams, bad dreams, straight-up nightmares. Please remember to tag for warnings in the header if things are going to be bad!

Have you been having trouble getting a good night's sleep? Tossing and turning, unable to rest those tired eyes? Or maybe you don't sleep at all, and never have. Not to worry! For a little while, you'll have no trouble at all falling asleep - in fact, as night falls, you'll find yourself overwhelmed with exhaustion whether you want to sleep or not. Lay down and rest your weary head, friends. Everyone could use a little extra sleep.

But what will your dreams bring? Something happy, images of a perfect day? Something hopeful, something you've wanted for a long time? Maybe you'll dream of anger, of the face of your worst enemy. Or maybe - just maybe - you'll have a horrific nightmare, and wake screaming, covered in cold sweat.

Not before others have time to see it, though. As you sleep, as you dream, the other residents of Hadriel, friends and enemies and people you've only met once, might find their way into your dreams. Or you might find your way into theirs - and then have to deal with someone's else's nightmares, or hopes, or anger. For the next ten nights, you'll find yourself either a host or a visitor, and no matter how you try you won't be able to stay awake once night falls.

Sweet dreams, Hadriel. Don't let the asshole fear gods bite.

► This log covers May 16th-26th.
► Feel free to make your own logs as well!
► Please tag headers of threads with content warnings where they apply
► Please put your character's name and open/closed in the subject line of your starters!
► You can't die in the dreams, but if you somehow manage to trip and fall and kill yourself getting out of bed, please report it on the death post.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It wouldn't be impossible to keep something like Rey asleep. She had been left that way for years at a time, before she would be inevitably woken up with new memories and a new life and, ultimately, a new mission.

But she gets where Nick is coming from, too. What he's trying to do. She can respect that, even, because it's what she would do in his place.

After a moment of consideration, she sits upright, bringing her hand over the top of her head. With her other, she slowly reaches out and takes his. It may look a lot like her father's, but she tries not to think about that so much.

She knows how this scene was supposed to play out. How she was supposed to hurt him, split his skull in two. Nick doesn't deserve that, though. He doesn't deserve any of this.

Choking back on her words, she can't think of a coherent response. So, instead, she just reaches out, takes his offered hand, and helps to pull herself back onto her feet as well.

"All right," she says once she's upright, more to herself than anything else. "All right. Let's get out of here."

The door is right there. At least this one doesn't have to be kicked down. It'll open just fine.

Nick nods in return, still trying to reassure her as he lets go of her hand. "All right. Let's go."

He takes a step for the door before turning toward it, and clocks his head into the dangling light a second time. He rubs his head, shooting the light an annoyed look as he continues to the door, reaching for the handle. "Not used to being this damn tall."

With that, he gives the knob a turn and pulls the door open, completely unsure as to what he'll see on the other side.

In the wake of everything that's happened, a very strange and almost alien noise is stifled when Rey brings her hand over her mouth. Given how Lucas had centuries to get used to his size, it isn't often (or ever) that she ever got to see him make certain predictable blunders such as hitting his head on lights and doorframes. So there is something comical about seeing it now.

She shouldn't laugh, though, she knows. Especially when so few things can get such a reaction out of her.

"Apologies."

No, she's not really sorry, except perhaps for the fact that Nick has to be the one to deal with it.

The door leads down an empty corridor, opening up to a living room. The townhouse is rather spartan in appearance, with minimal furnishings and next to no decorations. No paintings or portraits on the walls. No books or reading materials or computers or wallscreen anywhere in sight. It's almost a shock that anyone were to reside here at all.

"Suppose the place hasn't quite been 'lived in' yet," Rey remarks, slowly remembering how things were at the time after her awakening.

While Nick can't say this is what he expected from a dream or a memory of Rey's, he reminds himself that it could be far worse. She could still be trying to tear him apart.

He crosses through the corridor quietly, keeping his footsteps light in case someone else is around, some other character from Rey's past who'd be better off forgotten. It's a challenge, given his new form -- getting himself low to the ground when he's suddenly seven feet tall is not something he'd ever expected to do, and it shows as he nearly catches himself on another light and the doorframe as they step into the living room.

The furnishings are utilitarian, at best. Rey just couldn't have nice things, could she? "I see your father wasn't much of a decorator," he utters to her as he looks for where they should head next.

Yes, she definitely could be. It's hard not to nearly laugh again when he almost makes the same mistake at the door. Good on Nick for being quick to learn better.

Any hint of mirth slowly fades once they make it farther into the townhouse, as she glances around the living area. Everything is as she remembers it, and she tends to remember things pretty damn well.

"He moves around a lot. Doesn't tend to stay in one place for very long." There's a reason for that, too, but it's not something she feels like going into. Too much terrible history.

She steps around him, moving into the nearly empty room. Rey finds herself almost disappointed when she doesn't see her brother anywhere in sight, but is also grateful all the same. She doesn't want to see how this place would twist him.

For now, she doesn't go anywhere. Just traces her hands across the arm of a couch. "This was home for four years," she says with a somber look. "It's... strange to see it all like this again. After everything that's happened."

As Rey takes her time to take in the room, Nick lets her, hoping that the moment of reflection will help her see that this is in the past. It can't hurt her anymore, not unless she lets it eat away at her -- not that Nick would have personal experience with letting the demons of the past get to him, of course.

"Was there some significance to this place, Rey?" he asks in the stillness, his voice still low. "Some reason you'd dream of this place in particular? Or was it the gods' choice about what goes on in our heads?"

They shouldn't dawdle too long, but he can help neither his inquisitive nature, nor his desire to aid her. It's easier to soothe the latter if he understands where she's coming from, and why.

None of this is real. She's starting to see this now. The window depicts a hazy street below, almost a fog of blurred images passing by. At some point, it's begun to rain; little thin droplets stream down the glass.

The sound of soft padding is soothing. Calm. She can close her eyes a moment and drift into the memory that she's now fallen into. Think of a different time spent within these walls.

"Never had a home before. Not really." If her false memories didn't belong to a worthless street urchin, it was a poor soul from a broken home and a broken life. Not much of a home at all, to say the least. "This place was the closest thing I ever had to one, even if it was almost more like a prison sometimes. Still, it... meant something, for a while. At least, when my brother was around. He didn't live here, though. My father and brother weren't on very friendly terms."

Doubtful that she needs to explain why.

Nick looks down at his hands -- the hands of, presumably, Rey's father, a man she'd been driven to attack on sight.

"Your brother, Orion," he notes to himself. "I'm guessing that if your brother is as good as you say, and the two of you didn't get along with your father, then he wasn't worth the air he breathed."

Nick doesn't know the sordid details of what the man did, but given what he knows of Rey's past, of how she's been used again and again... it's easy to fill in the rest of the picture. He doesn't need to know all he did; all he needs to know is that Rey doesn't trust him. That's good enough for Nick.

Though knowing he's completely out of the picture would be nice.

For as much as she tends not to speak very highly of her own father, her shoulders slump at hearing Nick's words.

"Yes, but we had different reasons. I... was angry, for him bringing me back. I'd hoped to have stayed dead, at the time." She rests her hand over the back of the couch, avoiding meeting Nick in the eye and seeing the man's face who she had despised. "In truth, if not for him, I wouldn't even be here. And I hated him for that."

Dying is easy, but living is hard. That's what Rey used to always believe, and it's still true. She just has no desire to actively seek out the former as she used to.

Nick has to admit to himself that in a way, he owes this father of hers, too. If he hadn't brought Rey back, he'd have never met her. As selfish of a thought as that is, he's fairly certain his life is better for having her in it, even if it did require him to be kidnapped to some underground city.

But he knows all about owing his life to someone else -- not just to the original Nick. "You may owe your life to him, but that doesn't mean he deserves any kind of gratitude for it. Hell, I wouldn't be here if a bunch of scientists hadn't thought to put me together, but I can't exactly commend their methods. Taking another man's mind and shoving it in a machine raises a whole bunch of ethical questions."

Not to mention the questions it makes the machine ask himself time and time again.

Fair point. Rey knows Nick is right, and it isn't even the first time she's heard those words.

'He brought you back, sure. But you don't owe him shit.' That's what her brother had told her, and she understood better than he knew, even if he didn't realize that.

"Funny. I know I wouldn't be much better off without the memories shoved into my head, either. Even if it was supposed to be punishment." A punishment that wasn't undeserved, from where Rey is standing. She just wasn't stable when she was just a machine, though she wasn't much more stable when she had the memories of those horrible lives crammed into her skull. Still, she also wouldn't be here without them.

Rey pauses, her gaze casted to the hardwood floor.

"I'll never understand why he did it. It isn't like he had any sort of moral or familial obligation to or anything... My father and brother, they didn't realize it, but I already knew that there was something wrong with him. That he didn't have the ability to love me like a daughter -- or love anyone at all, for that matter." A simper twitches across her mouth. "Ironic, really. Time has dissolved his humanity, while it has helped give me mine."

Nick watches Rey carefully as she talks about her father, this man who gives her such revulsion, yet to whom she ultimately owes her life. That's a hard position to be in; Rey seems to have been put into a lot of those in her lifetime.

"Some of us just aren't cut out to be human," he says finally. He means more than just her father, as he always does -- he means both her and himself, as well. Though Nick still struggles to view himself as a true person, he will fight for Rey's status as one. She deserves better than being treated like a machine, and no one will convince him otherwise.

"Why was he punishing you, anyway?" Nick asks, pretty damn sure it was for no good reason at all.

No, suppose some people just aren't. Rey's seen her fair share of monsters in her lifetimes. People who had no right to be considered human. Her father may not be the worst among them on the surface, he is definitely the worst she has ever known.

At Nick's question, Rey feels the muscles in her face tense. She moves around the couch, taking a seat on the cushion so that she can lean forward, pulling her hands over her hair. It would be easier just to shrug it off, tell Nick that 'it's complicated' and leave it at that. Even if it is complicated...

"It wasn't my father who programmed all these memories into me, if that's what you're thinking. It was another synthetic who did that -- the first one ever made in my world, to be exact. Called himself Gregory. He cared about our creators very much. So when I... killed my mother, he thought it more fitting that I be punished than to be terminated, as was intended from the start."

Execution would've been a smaller mercy, arguably... considering what Rey had to endure over the century. But again, she wouldn't be here had that been the way of things.

That's what Nick thinks, as well -- if she hadn't been treated so badly, she wouldn't be who she is now, wouldn't be who he'd come to know and care about. Life was funny like that: experiences could shape one for both good and bad. Hell, Nick knows all too well that while he's occasionally bitter for being thrown out like the Institute's trash, he wouldn't be a detective if things hadn't worked out like that. Sometimes, the good does come with the bad; the trick is finding it.

He paces slowly across the room, his eyes still on her. That synth helped shape her, but Nick can't help that overprotective streak in him, one that gets him mad on her behalf. "Was that kind of cruelty programmed into him, or did he come up with it all on his own?"

At one point Rey did truly hate Gregory. Like her father, she shouldn't have to owe the synth who tortured her for nearly a century anything but contempt. She can't, though. All that hatred she had felt, it was forced into her by this dream. But now she's back to where she's been for some time.

"Well, no one certainly anticipated him developing individuality. Or foresee him later manipulating the government before rising to Chancellor. Not that people knew their Chancellor wasn't human." She shrugs. "So, no. He wasn't programmed that way. Just like how I wasn't programmed to be the way I am."

They were more alike than Rey cared to confess. They both acted out on their emotions with bouts of insanity.

In a way, both Rey and this Gregory aren't too far off from the kind of synths from Nick's world. No one had anticipated how much of a threat they'd be; no one would have believed they could be so human that one couldn't tell when their own family was replaced. However, those are the ones under orders, synths who are tools for the Institute. They raid small towns, leave a wave of destruction where there'd once been a peaceful community. The strip the world for parts like one might strip a machine to salvage another, and no one knows just why.

Synths who had supposedly escaped with the Railroad and chosen to live a different life are far more rare, and with reason. And as for synths like him, there aren't any -- not that he knows of, anyway. Overall, synths can't be trusted, but it's not usually the synth's fault for that so much as it is their masters.

"It's whatever shapes us, in the end," he notes, watching the rain outside the window, the distortion from the droplets on the pane making the already unfocused view no better. "You weren't kidding when you said synths were the real threat in your world. In mine, it all traces back to the people pulling the synths' strings. The ones who go against their programming are usually escaping the bad guys."

"No, people are the real threat, even where I'm from. And the synthetics want to be more like-human. Nothing more dangerous than that."

Rey had seen their desperation in that prison she had escaped from. The people they had dissected in order to learn more about them and what made them tick. She had seen things that would give normal people nightmares, if not for the fact that she's already had plenty of her own to start.

Her fingers curl through her hair as she shakes her head. "Back home, I was one of the 'bad guys'. Did a lot of terrible, unforgivable things. Hurt a lot of people, including my own brother."

One could easily argue that it was really the one who had been pulling her strings that was the bad one here, but Rey can't easily pass off blame to absolve her of her guilt. Many of those things she did, and no amount of remorse will be able to undo them.

This moment, the one she is in right now, is just a reminder of that fact.

He sighs. She's right in that the people behind the machines are the threat, but he can't say he agrees that synths who want to be human are, as well. The two of them come from different times, though, different worlds; that's hard for Nick to remember sometimes when they're stuck in a cavern city, both on equal footing, both as trapped as rats in a maze. Different worlds, different synths.

It sounds like the ones in her world want to be human and take out humanity in the same fell swoop, while those where he's from -- the "liberated" ones, at least -- just want to coexist, not be shot because they were made rather than born. A part of him knows synths are the enemy of the Commonwealth, but he feels for those who desperately want something more. He's wondered plenty of times about what he'd do if he had the chance to be human -- truly human, not just one of those fancy, bioengineered synths. If someone could wave a magic wand over him and turn him into a real person, would he do it?

He doesn't know. He can't quite recall living as anything else but the mechanical copy he is, and taking that away from him would ultimately be stripping away a part of his identity. People liked knowing what he was -- it let them keep an eye on him while reassuring them that he was telling the truth, on their side as much as a Protectron or a Mister Handy. He has reasoning, judgment, compassion -- all the good of humanity, minus some of the benefits of actually being human. Outside of Diamond City, he still got occasional looks of suspicion, glances from everyone suspecting him of being something far more sinister than he really was.

That isn't to say they aren't justified looks, as the world is full of dangerous synths. There are synths out there who'd have been happy to peacefully coexist with humanity, but given that they were so lifelike in the first place, it was hard for them to prove what they were without putting themselves in grave danger. They were in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation, and for as much envy as he has for them sometimes, he wouldn't wish their struggles on anyone.

But the fact was that they wanted to be better than what was expected of them from their former masters. They wanted to start fresh, no matter what they'd done in their brief lives. If they could make that decision, anyone could.

"Was one of the bad guys, but you're not now," he says, making his way to the couch and taking a seat next to her. "If you really wanted, you've got the chance to make something else of yourself here. Maybe even home, for as long as we're trapped."

Maybe someday Rey will realize that she ought to put her foot where her mouth is, especially when it comes to her bias towards synths. Ironic, considering what she is -- but then, she had her own bias about herself and her own state as a synthetic-organic being as well. She never thought of herself as something that merited its own rights. Even as a 'human' in the military, you taught to strip yourself of your identity, your individuality. To become part of a bigger collective. As a 'human', she was used to being dehumanized. Sometimes, she was still no different than a machine.

So trying to adapt to the civilian lifestyle, and then... whatever the hell sort of lifestyle this is, it goes against everything she had been trained to be. Completely contradicts all of what she knows. It's easy to lose sight of the reality of things: That what she knows is just plain fucked up beyond all reason.

(FUBAR.)

"A lot people are dead because of me. What right do I have to get that chance while they remain dead? Who says that I even deserve any of those things?"

Sometimes it's hard simply to breathe, let alone experience feelings of laughter and joy, knowing all of the things that she's done.

Her hands slide over her face. Her unblemished, perfect-looking face. A face she also has no right to keep, and will later make sure that the scars she left on the world reflect on her own skin. And even that doesn't feel like it's enough. So long as she lives, it never feels enough.

Though it does give Nick a timeframe for when the presumed mixture of nightmare and memory may have occurred, it is admittedly odd to see Rey without those scars; he's gotten accustomed to them, and to see her face so unmarked is almost like looking at a different person. Then again, given he's now seven feet tall and a lot less synthetic than usual, he supposes he can't say much for the feeling of talking to a stranger.

"We've all got our demons, Rey. And some of those you're facing, they aren't even yours. Punishing yourself won't bring back the dead, and you know it."

He leans forward, elbows on his knees, his eyes still on her. He can hear the remorse in her voice -- it's a quality that separates her from some of the filth he's met in the Commonwealth, people who'd kill for a few caps and never feel anything for it. They might not deserve another chance just yet, but she certainly does.

"The best you can do is keep going. Leave a place better than when you came to it. You can't change what's already happened, but maybe you can make it up in another way."

He's not completely wrong, and he isn't even the first one to mention something like that. Even a woman named Faye, who one of Rey's old selves had undoubtedly wronged, had accepted her for being an entirely different person now. That her past lives were just ghosts living inside of her head. They don't much belong to her any more than Nick owns his imprinted memories, all things considered.

Yes, she may be a different person now. But who is that person supposed to be, exactly? A killer? Protector? Soldier? Civilian? All of the above and et cetera?

Her fingers curl over her forehead, bones tensing and shoulders curling inward as she struggles with the logic that Nick presents. Or is trying to. Got to give him credit for the effort...

"I thought I was making up for it, by taking myself out of the equation. I didn't... I didn't see any other way. But all I did was fuck everything up. Again. And it'd hurt my brother."

And her father, technically. But hey, fuck him.

Nick's eyes narrow as he keeps watching her. He doesn't like the sound of 'by taking myself out of the equation' one bit. There's nothing he can do about it now though, much like there's nothing she can do to change what she's done. What he can do is make sure she doesn't do anything like that again.

"Well, he's not here, now is he?" Nick remarks. "He's not in this room, and he's not in Hadriel with us. So stop worrying about hurting him and start thinking about yourself for a change. And if you need help doing that, well... you know where I am."

"Yes, I do..."

There's a moment in which Rey casts him a sidelong glance, but then she sees the man who created her instead, and anger boils in the pit of her stomach all over again. The same rage that bubbled over in this point in history, in which she had assaulted him for the sole violation of bringing her back from the dead. Such a heinous crime.

Guilt follows that rage, and Rey shifts her head, casting her gaze off Nick.

"It's... really hard to talk to you when you look like that," she confesses. "No offense, but I just keep wanting to smash that face in."

No offense, technically. Since it's not like it's Nick's face, after all.

"Oh." He clears his throat and gets to his feet, a hair embarrassed that he'd managed to forget what he looked like for even a second.

"Sorry about that. Not often I find myself in a completely different body. Guess it's better you'd rather smash his face in than mine."

Despite everything, Rey scoffs.

"Honestly, your actual face already looks like it's been beaten to hell as it is. No need to wreck it even further."

Is that Rey being a smartass? Why yes, yes it is.

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tw: suicide mention, wup

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