righthemisphere | IC CONTACT

[There's a little Japanese girl standing in an alleyway, surrounded by dirt and devastation, crying hysterically to the sounds of encroaching danger. So much noise, so much going on — it feels particularly vivid, though, to be some man's dream. The death and destruction no doubt rippling through this city is practically tangible, if not slightly worn at the edges from being second-hand.

Lucifer doesn't really know a whole lot about drifting, but if he did, he would think it's just a terrible concept for human beings. They're nasty little things, especially when they're so intimately close with another one; they're willing to do anything, become anything.

Regardless, the girl's crying next to him is absolutely grating. He gestures sharply with his hand, and the scene freezes, leaving the space eerily quiet. The girl stares, frozen, up in horror at what danger lurks beyond her false safehaven.

Lucifer sighs, and speaks to a man who isn't aware of his presence yet:]

Much better. How do you handle the sounds of kids crying?

It's like nails on a chalkboard.

It's a dream Raleigh has had several times before. Tokyo. Onibaba. Mako.

Just a month or two ago it was a memory he'd relived with the Mako here in Deerington. In The Grady, trapped in a small, dark room until they faced a peephole. Maybe that's why he's dreaming about it again, tonight.

Dreaming of monsters and loss and Mako, any Mako it seems. It all whirls around in his subconscious. Churning over and over and over again.

Raleigh's dreamscape is fragile and flighty. It shifts without warning at any given moment, slipping and dropping through hole after hole. This mind is not a healthy one. This mind is exhausted and broken and desperately trying to keep everything together as it takes blow after mental blow.

The most recent of which is Lucifer's doing. Raleigh found Wu's ghost. He touched it. He was possessed.

And like now, a memory of someone else's memory inside of him, he saw, heard, felt everything.

In this dream of a memory twice removed, Raleigh should be wearing his drive suit, but he isn't. He's wearing the grubby jacket and gloves he's worn most of March, covered in other people's blood as he dutifully shoveled up the remains of the fallen and buried them in graves of his own making.

Here, now, standing in the alley on pause, focus pulls to the dream walker. To the side Mako stands with tears in her eyes, mouth open in a frozen sob. Overhead, debris from Onibaba's advance hovers in the air. Coyote Tango is due any moment. The kaiju slain. Stacker Pentecost's last mission.

Last until it wasn't anymore. Three hours of solo run, burning as he carried Tamsin's ragdoll body across the finish line.

Onibaba isn't a threat anymore, not in the real world and not in this dream. A new kaiju appears in human form but the energy he gives is just as threatening. Raleigh hears him and turns before tensing.

"Sam-"

Mm. Does he detect a hint of familiarity, with that one, clipped name? He supposes that works in his favor, if he plays things properly; nobody knows Sam better than him, do they? Oh, Dean Winchester thinks he does.

'Sam' smiles at Raleigh, friendly and light, as if they'd just ran back into each other on the road. He raises a hand, gives a small wave, and steps casually forward. There's an unmistakable chill — a pressure in the air — that bleeds from him in this dream. A feeling of... moreness. Of being less than human, bigger than the body implies. "Yeah, Raleigh. It's me. I'm guessing... you've been trying to get a bead on me, haven't you?"

He couldn't possibly imagine why.

"Something like that."

Behind them, for a moment, Wu flickers in and out, a pale, shimmering silver. Soundlessly begging for his life.

It flashes through the dream. The snow. The clearing. The scent of incense burning from two large sticks of it in the darkness like two red, glowing eyes. Like Sam's red, glowing eyes.

You see, I just have no use for your useless palace-

"Why'd you do it?"

Sam sighs through his nose, arms crossing over a broad chest. He looks pained at the thought of it all for a moment. Regretful, even. But the look, it comes and goes, as false as the dream they're both walking through. The shrug he offers is so utterly devoid of any guilt, he may has well be unsure of what he wants for lunch.

"... He was rude to me. I might have just left him mangled and alive, if he hadn't been so disrespectful."

That's up in the air. He may still have killed him anyway. We'll never know, will we?

"Bullshit," Raleigh answers.

He doesn't think that would have happened for a second.

"You decided to kill him the second you saw him."

Lucifer's eyebrows rise.

"Oh, feisty." But alright, alright. He relents a bit more blunt honesty, for the sake of this sour human and his gnawing, growing vendetta. Anything to hurt Sam's credibility with these people; it's unfortunate that he has to do this, but his vessel needs to remember who has done the most for him, the last few years.

And to make him not want to fight him anymore, of course.

After all, who wants to keep fighting if everyone you knew hates you?

"The truth of the matter is... that he was too nice to someone I don't like. Meeting him and seeing how obnoxious he was, though? It just made me want to burn his brains out of his skull even more."

Jesus Christ that is absolutely infuriating to hear someone say.

Raleigh clenches with anger. With hurt and betrayal.

"What happened to you?"

Memories of morning runs and gentle conversation. Affectionate bitching about their older brothers. Plans for a community garden.

All with a different Sam, not that Raleigh particularly realises there are two, but Sam all the same.

Edited 2021-03-29 00:35 (UTC)

Lucifer shakes his head in what seems like the equivalent of a father disappointed in his son's disobedience. It's too light, too holier-than-thou, like Raleigh just can't seem to grasp the common sense of it all. "It's really none of your business, is it? I swear, there's this... entitlement of knowing things with you people."

But he seems to relent, if only to smash apart whatever image Raleigh had of Sam, down to the smallest, sharpest pieces.

"There was always something like this in me, Raleigh. Always capable of taking people apart and not bothering to put them back together again. You couldn't feel it or see it, sure, but it was always there. I was born to be this way. I was destined for it. For greatness."

He shrugs. The frozen little girl stands at his left-hand side, as he circles her like she's the sun, as if she's got a sort of gravity. Maybe to this Raleigh guy, she is something of the sort; a positive energy. She must mean a lot to him, if she's standing here in his dreams.

"I just had to find the right time to embrace it. And what better time than now?"

Man this is like talking to a completely different guy (duh).

Then again, people can be weird in dreams, not that Raleigh is aware of the meta of it. One usually isn't when they're dreaming.

As a veteran pilot you'd think he'd have better control but the one thing he said he could never handle again- feeling someone die, sharing those last terrified, tortured moments- well it happened. So forgive him if he's chaotic and easy to tear apart. He's having a very bad week.

The thought of Wu- of Sam doing what he did- rips out half the dreamscape and replaces it with another fracture of a memory. Like a stageshow half way between scene change. It judders under Lucifer's power where it would have flipped completely. Somewhere in the distance Wu's ghostly form is still begging for his life. Mako to one side still frozen with tears in her eyes, and now on the other side of the alley where a brick wall had been is a hole into Gipsy's connpod.

A step deeper into Raleigh's soul.

All due respect sir we intercepted the kaiju- Yancy says from his harness, speaking to someone authoritative and very angry over the comms.

Bagged our fifth kill, the Raleigh on that side of the looking glass chimes in, cocky and excited.

The Raleigh facing Sam curls his fists, refusing to look. He knows what come next. He sees it every night.

Every. Single. Night.

His guest is running out of time. Raleigh will wake when his copilot dies. At 3:48am like clockwork. Every. Single. Night.

"I'm gonna find you," he grinds out. A threat Lucifer has no doubt heard countless times by now.

"Wu didn't deserve it. I don't give a shit what he did to you."

Edited (Potato fingers) 2021-03-30 22:00 (UTC)

Lucifer watches with placid interest, as the world around him changes. Human minds are such a terrible thing, aren't they? Always funneling into chaotic, nonsensical images, chemical imbalances... dreams presenting all of someone's traumas and flaws like a soul laid stripped of flesh in hell. Lucifer's familiar with it, the intricate way a human is built; Dad did well at that, he'll admit. They're flawed, horrible little things, but their machinery is complex and difficult and not so easy to put in little neat boxes. You can carve and carve and carve into them and unearth more in their bones, in their brains, than any yowling cat or whimpering dog.

It's gross, really, but in that fun way you'd dissect a frog.

False sympathy pulls at his face, brow furrowed and frown a ghost of Sam Winchester.

"You poor thing. You're such a mess in here, it's any wonder you can function. Maybe that's why you're filled with so much animosity... like I was." Sam's muffled voice begs Lucifer to stop. I hear you, I know what you're doing; please, just stop. Lucifer ignores him and continues, "It just... starts breaking you apart, doesn't it? Watching person after person suffer. I'll admit, my dreams used to look a lot like yours. Messy. Full of death and failure."

Smiling, though, he gestures towards poor Yancy, so close to a grizzly fate.

"They're all replaceable, though. That's the secret to a good night's sleep. There are a million other Wu's out there. A million other... sad little girls." He glances at Mako, glances at Raleigh. "Plenty of people to shove into a cockpit and use until that one dies and the next comes in."

Yancy is about to be ripped out of the cockpit.

"People's worth is the blink of an eye." Yancy is fear, looking up at that terrible creature. Trapped in his final moments. "What they do and don't deserve doesn't matter, in the grand scope of things. They're all ultimately... pretty worthless. So why cry over spilled milk, champ?"

Raleigh opens his mouth to answer but the scene to his left is swirling towards the finish line.

He wants to yell that Sam is wrong. That these people, these relationships, are one of a kind. That knowing and cherishing them is the reason to live. He burns with anger for the death of his friend. He carries the sorrow of loss and feels it so acutely in every breath that it almost feels like needles on inhale.

Inhale sharp, stinging nettles.

Exhale fire and wrath.

Instead there's only the sound of metal screaming as it's torn by a monster. The scream of claxons. Finally he turns and looks, lurching towards it as if pulled by an invisible rope around his heart. A bond. The Drift. Blues and ambers offset by darkness and white armor slicked with red.

RALEIGH, LISTEN TO ME-

And then he wakes. Like clockwork. Heaving for breath with sweat at his temples in a nice, warm bed with a nice, warm body curled against his side. Chuck murmurs something in his sleep and throws his arm over Raleigh's waist the way he does most nights. It's just routine now. Try to lull him back to sleep. It doesn't work but it's the thought that counts.

No, no the only thought he's got is that he needs to find Sam.

Find Sam Winchester and make him pay.

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dreamwalkin sometime before april 1st :)

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