he's come to take his children home.

[sorrypardonyesthankyou]

WHO: Everybody!
WHAT: Digging into the brains of the setting, then dealing with the aftermath of...doing that............
WHERE: The ruins, vaguely in the vicinity of the wall with the weird writing
WHEN: July 5th
NOTA BENE: Stupid ideas and blood. Please note content where appropriate.
NOTES: Need more information? Want to leave comments or questions? Check the OOC post or PM me!

well, the first days are the hardest days

It feels like morning to Ruth when she hits the TALK button on her walkie-talkie, though it's hard to say it actually is: day and night don't differ nearly as much in these ruins as they did at home. She's walking, somewhat confidently, toward the wall she keeps running across, the one whose texture she's come to recognize; it seems as good a place as any to do this.

"It's Ruth. Sorry. I'm going to pardon go now. Meet yes, meet me at the wall."

For her, it's been two days since she made the first broadcast. This one is short, easy enough to miss or just plain ignore...

let me know your mind

...But if you catch it, please meet her at the wall. Pardon.

Astral projection isn't a particularly flashy ability. The sight is positively dull: a nineteen-year-old curls up with her head on a backpack and falls asleep under a line of text she's never seen. From the moment her breathing evens out, she might as well be comatose: she can't be roused by talking, shaking, or anything else.

It doesn't take long for blood to start dripping from her nose, running down the side of her face and onto the ground. Bloodstains start to form on her blindfold and eventually run down her cheek as well. If the blindfold is removed, it won't be evident where those streaks of blood are coming from--the skin beneath is smooth, unbroken by the suggestion of eyelids or tear ducts. After that, the trembling starts, her skin feverish as her body begins to jerk itself into convulsions.

If you're out there with her body...well, have fun with that.

(goddamn--well, i declare)

She's gone, reaching out with every scrap of mental energy she's tried to save up for this moment. Freed from the confines of her own flesh, Ruth jets up into the sky and resists the desire to linger and look out over the green place, straining for something: a sense of where to aim, how to get beyond the damp world they've all wandered into.

When she finds her way inside it, she wonders if it took pity on her and let her in. Because it knows she's there--that much, she's certain of. It surrounds her, a dark womb swallowing up the shape her spirit usually takes. She's a mind untethered, errant thoughts existing within another mind, knowing without being.

Nothing about it is recognizable, but all feels familiar. They know each other for a moment, or maybe longer--time means even less in here--and all there is to find is the wordless presence that has her. She's a firefly in something's cupped palms, unable to fathom what's happened to her (aware of that lack of understanding, at least), and at the mercy of a being that could bring its hands together at any moment.

But it doesn't crush her. It seems to like her, all of them, too much for that. A pity it doesn't seem to know its own strength.

what i want to know: where does the time go?

Ruth's pushed back into her body with a force she's never experienced before, something beyond mere psychic barriers. It echoes outward from her in all directions, a silent, vibrant wave of energy that moves through everything in its path without effort.

Anyone nearby could end up in the ripples of her return from the world's mind, even if they weren't planning on having anything to do with this endeavour. The shockwave rolls out in a riot of light and colour, overwhelming every sense and disappearing within the same breath. After it fades, you might be left with strange side effects; having been hit by Ruth's psychic energy, one or two of her powers (...or issues) might linger. Voices might murmur in your ears. Every thought, every feeling, might become public knowledge. Golden strands of possible futures, impossible for you to read in this place, might haunt your sight.

...Or you might just start stuttering. Pardon. Sorry. Yes.

(Meanwhile, Ruth stops shaking, disappearing for a few more hours into a deep, dreamless sleep. Her body needs rest, even if her mind doesn't.)

Comments

[omniavincit]

Reality ruptures; William has the wit to wonder if they're moving again, if the ground underfoot is being shuffled like a deck of cards, then he doesn't. His vision shatters into shimmering fragments as he's thrown against the nearest wall, limbs feeling like afterthoughts, his entire body vestigial for a moment. It's the pain that brings him back, followed by the sound of someone—him? not him—vomiting.

His head starts to throb. It's an effort to think, like shouting down a crowd. He was wrong. This place wants them dead.

His hand scrabbles up the wall and he fights to find his footing. Not again, in his head, persistent as a moan, sharp as a cry, percussive as an order. He nearly says it himself, when he works his mouth open: what comes out instead is a groan. He turns and there's the guy—the one who'd all but prowled the area around Ruth's limp body. The one William had been avoiding.

No. Like needles darting in and out. No. For some reason he expects more blood—wouldn't be surprised if the walls fucking bled—as the man scratches at his own eyes. “Don't—” he says. Does he say it? He drowns in the moment, floating and burning and speared in place.

The claws flash through the air and he stumbles backward. Part of him just wants to scream. That's what it feels like this is building to—the voices in his head twisting into a howl. “Your hands,” he says weakly. “Your—they're—” Panic takes hold and he frantically pats himself down. Eyes, knuckles, head.

[snikthatch]

Lost, drowning in red and black, Logan barely hears William's words over the din of those murmuring voices. He clutches his head with his hands, thin lines of blood running down over his knuckles and wrists as sharp adamantium edges bite into his skin, his healing factor not quite able to keep up with the wounds. Staggering and snarling like an animal chased by a swarm of bees, he tries to shake it off, tries to find reality again.

Distantly, as the tsunami of psychic energy begins to recede, he smells someone nearby. Someone real, someone he knows. Old sweat and flannel, spider blood on his shoes and ink on his fingertips. Someone who was there before -- and then Logan remembers why he's there, remembers what's happened. The world solidifies under his feet.

Get it together. He digs deep, relying on decades of training and experience to think through the psychic storm. Ignore the blindness. Ignore the noise. Focus on what's important. Breathe.

"Ruth," he grates out, a guttural animal noise, a little too loud over the voices only he can hear. "What happened to Ruth?"

[omniavincit]

He doesn't know what he's witnessing—the blood's the only thing he can make sense of, and he fixates on it, watching it trail down the man's hands. Drip to the ground. Are they being claimed? Is this what's going to happen, metal shrieking out of their bodies, their flesh swallowed up by the landscape?

“Don't touch your head, don't—you have claws. Fuck.” The last word a kind of verbal shudder. He winds up in a demented dance with the other man, trying to keep him at arm's length as he lurches and snarls. A voice exhorts him to get it together. Fuck you, William thinks. His skull feels ready to crack, a cacophony of no and stop ringing through it.

Breathe. That takes, at least. He forces himself to inhale. Exhale. Consciously or not, his breathing starts to line up with the other man's.

“Her eyes are gone.” His voice, flat, veers into disbelief at the last moment—catches on something like a laugh or a sob. Don't say she's dead. Don't say she's dead. “Don't say she's dead,” he mutters under his breath, steadying himself against the wall. “She was over there.” On the ground. Unresponsive.

He points, then for some reason—maybe it's the way the other man's eyes don't seem to follow—says, “Let's go together. Okay?”

[snikthatch]

Logan smells fear and adrenaline on the man's breath, jagged ozone under the copper stink of blood. His response filters faintly through the tide of voices, his words the only ones Logan can understand, seeming to thrum through Logan's bones rather than into his ears.

Eyes gone.. she's dead.. together..

Shredding and clawing his way through the psychic haze, Logan strains his senses for any hint of Ruth. Teenage sweat and the bruised sweetness of the crushed grass under her body. Blood, far too much for it to be safe. Under the cacophony of voices, he can't hear her heartbeat.

She'd promised him -- she'd promised she would try to come back. And he'd encouraged her. Told her to do it.

Ruth, kid, please --

Logan feels the possibility that he's killed the only part of his world left in this place lurch through him like a cold black flood. He lunges forward, then his knees buckle and he buries his claws in the ground, ugly animal sounds of grief coming from his throat.

[omniavincit]

His own words echo back to him, distorted, as if from a great distance. Stones at the bottom of a well. The man in front of him—his face scrunches into a set of hard lines and he moves his head, quick and exact, obeying some animal instinct. A catalog of scents shifts through William's thoughts—scents he slowly realizes he doesn't smell, like someone's rifling through his head in a panic.

Where's her heartbeat? He can almost—he's losing his mind—feel its absence, the pulse where it should be. “It stopped.” Hard to place the voice as his own: it's scraped raw. Her heart stopped and he didn't notice, it just stopped and the world kept going.

The other man lunges. Then something in him seems to snap and he collapses, claws driven into the ground. I killed her. William's fingers dig into the fabric of his coat, one arm crossed over his chest. Different voices crying her name, all of them desperate, and underneath the sound of—not sobs, not moans. Scraps of noise, a voice broken down to nothing.

“I'm sorry,” William says from his safe remove. Tense, watching the heave of the man's body—one swipe of a hand and there would go William's arm. A punch to the gut and he'd be done for. So he stands there with a man crumpled at his feet and a wailing in his head until the shame of it gets to be too much. He inches forward, lowers himself to a knee beside the other man.

He reaches to touch him—fingertips only grazing his shoulder. William breathes in, sets his palm on his back. Human, not metal. Maybe that'll make a difference. “Come back. I need—you to come back.”

[snikthatch]

William's voice is a shout in a hurricane, a distant noise lost in the wall of muttering sound that washes through Logan's mind. The lessons that have been pounded into him by Xavier, by Jean and Emma and Rachel, aren't enough, not against this tide -- the edges of his telepathic walls are beginning to fray. The murmuration takes on William's inflections, becoming anxious, afraid, sick with fear.

Logan grits his teeth and tries to hold on, searching for things to hold on to. The pain in his knuckles as the claws grind against his bones, the smell of William nearby and the rich earth under his hands. The berserker in his soul throws himself against the bars of his cage, making him want to rip things apart, but he can't, not with innocent people in the way.

Don't lose it, don't lost it, don't lose it don't lose it --

William's hand is a weight on his back, an anchor of warmth.

Come back. Come back.

It feels like the brush of wings and tastes like ashes.

Logan. Let go.

And it's that simple. Let go. Accept. Like standing in the rain and knowing you're going to get wet, not fighting it, not wanting to be anything else. Logan forces himself to relax and the tumult of psychic energy doesn't fade, but becomes part of his mental landscape, parting around him instead of crashing against his walls, and he finds he can stand against the flood.

He pulls in a ragged breath, his claws sliding back into his forearms with a grating of metal. He still can't see, but he can feel the ground beneath him, can smell William and the others nearby. Ellie. Ruth.

Focus. Breathe.

Logan scratches up the ability to speak through the psychic din.

"I'm OK.. it's OK. Ruth. We need to.. make sure."

He sits back on his heels, turning his head towards where he can smell Ruth, then hauls himself to his feet. He's not used to being blinded, at least not without the burning ache of healing as his eyeballs grow back, but he remembers long days of training with Ogun, silk blindfold around his head as he knocked stones and shuriken out of the air with a staff. Two senses down, he relies on the others to make his way towards where Ruth lies beside the wall.

[omniavincit]

It's like listening to an earthquake without feeling it, hearing the tremor and the shudder and at the same time struggling, inexplicably, to locate it. Scraps of instruction—the gaps stand out more than what's there, like a dilapidated staircase—whisk through his head. Along the way, William closes his eyes. He leans into the other man, though the idea of William supporting him, William as a bulwark, is fucking—

The claws retract into the man's body. William cringes against the sound, reminded of a knife or a braking train. He makes a noise, not a sob but close, a series of choked gasps.

He opens his eyes and looks, but the man doesn't even seem to have registered what's happened. That it's under his skin. “Okay,” William echoes. “Just—” He reaches for the man's hand, heavy and callused, and swabs with the sleeve of his jacket at the blood pooled in his knuckles. Thorough to the point of meticulousness. “Here. Other one.” He does it again, feeling stupid and automatic and desperate, as though blotting up the blood will blot out everything else.

“You can't see, can you?” he asks when they reach her body. She's tipped over on the rocky ground, blood dried to her face and clothes. “I'll look for a pulse,” he says, inflection out of tune with the words. I'll start digging, he might as well be saying.