singillatim | prelude

prelude

January 1st 2015

Do you remember yesterday? What is tomorrow?
How will you face this quiet apocalypse?
— Raphael van Lierop.

As the old year falls and the new year begins, the skies fill with light. An Aurora comes on the last day of December, and with it the usual signs of it: the ethereal noise, the cracks and pops in the air, the stuttering of electrics as they struggle to power on and then blare and flicker. It is, as Interlopers have come to know, business as usual — in terms of the Auroras within this world. However, something a little different happens this time.

Interlopers will fall asleep all over the town of Milton. Even the ones who fight sleep and try to stay up into the small hours of the night will find themselves drifting off for a short while — as if their eyes just feel too heavy to keep open, and their minds slip into a deep kind of quiet darkness without their realising. And at first, there is nothing — nothing but the quiet dark. Something peaceful, almost.

A dream comes.

The first thing you notice is blood in your mouth, the cold in your bones, the deafening din in your ears — as if you are caught in static and the sound of howling winds through pine trees. You are afraid. At first, you do not know why. You find yourself on your knees in the snow. The skies are filled with green light, the air is thick with smoke. And then the realisation comes:

This is the ending of all things.

You look up, to the sight before you: a huge, shapeless shadow. Towering above you, over you. A head peers down at you: a cluster of three wolf skulls, eye-sockets glowing green and terrible, and their three open maws, dripping with more green. The sound it makes is unnatural, you cannot put it into words. The darkness draws in, you are so cold, so tired.

This is the ending of all things.

It is so hungry. You are so tired. The world falls away, you cannot see the stars, the dark hiding them from view. Were they even there to begin with? Or did they go out? You have forgotten. And you know, you know—

This is the ending of all things.

The skies glimmer, licks of strange, colourful wisps curl above — a voice screams out your name, from the static and winds. Through the noise. A woman’s voice. You have heard this voice before, in the lights and noise. Do you see? What could be? What you could become?

Can you hold on? Please. A hand grips your shoulder, but as you turn — the dream ends.

For some, they snap into waking with a shout or cry. Some will shudder awake to find tears in their eyes. All over Milton, the Interlopers wake: shaken, unsure, afraid. They will awaken to the dark: the Aurora is gone — slowly fading from the night skies into an otherwise calm and clear night.

It is a new year.

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Rorschach had fallen asleep in the middle of the night, something that was highly unusual for someone on a mostly nocturnal schedule. Feeling that sleepy was odd and he felt like something was wrong. Fortunately, he'd barely made it back to one of the cabins he resided in before he'd completely passed out instead of ending up lying in the snow or on a rooftop. He didn't even have a chance to remove his face before he did so.

Had anyone still been awake and in the room to observe him, they would have seen him thrashing around like someone in the middle of a violent PTSD nightmare, mumbling phrases that couldn't quite be made out. He'd had them before and this was not unusual for him. What was unusual was snapping awake and practically heaving himself out of bed before he realized what was going on. When he realized the dream was over with, he sat there on the edge of the bed, removing his face for once as he held his head in his hands, trying to make sense of what he'd just seen.

After he woke up, well, that was it. He wasn't sleeping for the next three days if he could help it. See, nightmares like these were the reason he didn't sleep much in the first place. You went to sleep and woke up feeling like the world was ending. One would find him the next late afternoon, just as the dim twilight turned into actual nightfall, awake and seeking out others. He had a thermos of coffee with him and was planning on drinking the entire thing to provide some incentive for his body to stay awake. "Have anything....strange happen last night?"

Edward, thank fuckin' god, had been good and not gone out on the rooftops for patrol when he fell asleep, dropping like a rock onto the carpet and snoring then and there. When he woke up with the dream still playing out under his eyelids, lingering like a ghost, he'd decided to stay up the rest of the night and into the next day.

In the afternoon, as he was doing somewhat shoddy repairs on an empty house in case someone new decided to move in there, he took note of Rorschach approaching and waved him over onto a chair he'd dragged out. "Nothing too strange," he said, "unless you're speaking of that dream?"

The dream comes to them when Cornelius and Billy are in bed, curled up, enjoying each other's company and the warmth of each other's body for the first time in fucking ages. He sees the wolves, he hears the woman's voice, he looks up at the sky and sees beauty, loveliness, power, him—

And then Hickey wakes up. He scrambles so that he's sitting upright, breathing heavily, trying to hold onto the image in his mind, trying to not let that dream fade away. He looks over at Billy who...is also awake?

(Of course he is. Billy's a part of this now. Disciples get visions just as much as prophets do.)

"What the fuck was that?" Hickey asks, not bothering to keep the awe and more-than-slight confusion out of his voice.

This is the ending of all things.

Crozier's roused from his nightmare quietly, body trembling and breath coming in short, sharp pants that fill the small space of the igloo with wisps of steam. He bends over in his fur-lined bedroom and sobs quietly into his only remaining hand.

The ending of all things: finally, finally.

He does something unusual after the dream end -- in the dead of night, Francis Crozier leaves the igloo and walks out to the community center. He's carrying a bundle on his back, presents from the wilderness he needs to still deliver.

Goodsir wakes as if dragging himself out of deep, dark water, and his face is wet with tears. He's trembling, and he sits for a long time in his bed before he can finally rouse himself completely.

Once he's finally up and dressed, he ventures out, seeking his friends first and foremost. Even though he doesn't know that his nightmares are a shared experience, he does feel very strongly that he needs to make sure that everyone he cares about is all right.

Levi awakes with a gasp and quickly rolls out of bed to grab the rifle under it. His eyes dart around the room for a few moments as his heart calms down and his brain catches up with being awake. When it does, he takes a deep breath and sits back down on his cot. That was not a normal nightmare. It almost reminded him of the dreams in Preheval, atop the tower with the sickeningly greenish moon hanging right atop it. Watching. Waiting.

But no tower this time, and no strange man(?) dressed like a jester telling him about a festival he never agreed to take part in. Instead there was just...the figure with three, wolfish heads. Its been a life time since he'd learned about the old gods (not counting the few tidbits Marina had shared), but he remembered enough. He buries his face in his hands, shivering. "...Gro-goroth."

Raju's head lifts at the movement at the door but his gaze is distant, thoughts half-on the words on the page in front of him, though his pen is unmoving in his hand. Then his gaze sharpens all at once; Raju knows the man making his way inside, though he'd realised at some point during the storm that he'd never asked for the man's name.

Raju raises his free hand, in place of a name, to try and get the man's attention, starts to stand and pauses to flick away the blanket still twisted around his thigh, impatiently. A couple straps and loops sewn onto it in neat brown thread make it easier to wear as a coat than it used to be but he doesn't bother with it now; for once, the cold isn't the thing most urgently on his mind. That would be a blessing, if every single thing about this place wasn't so damned frustrating.

"You too?" He calls it out and then moves closer, eyes flicking over the man's expression and then the rest of him, not bothering to keep his voice down. There isn't a one of them inside the building who's asleep, now. "It seems we all had one. I haven't checked the details against anyone else's yet."

Crozier’s thankful for the masking the cold does to emotions —- everyone looks like they’ve been sobbing when a biting wind’s been hitting them in the face for fifteen minutes. He spots his friend from before and silently moves towards him, not wanting to wake another of the others, if indeed they are asleep.

He drops the bundle in his hand onto a table. It doesn’t surprise him that others had the dream; it definitely wasn’t specific to him. That sense of anxiety and sheer relief still hasn’t left him, and he assumes those strong feelings are present in Raju as well.

“An omen?”

Levi's night's sleep had been about the same as it always was, which is to say it was horrible. The nightmare lingered in a way few other dreams had. It couldn't be good. He didn't know what it meant, but he knew it was bad. So he's on patrol with a bit more purpose, looking for anything that might end up being a danger or areas that need to be protected somehow. He stops when Rorschach addresses him and nods.

"...I had a nightmare. Different from the usual ones."

Had others had it too? People seemed to be more on edge than usual.

Its late, but when Croizer gets to the hall Levi is seated against a wall. He's methodically disassembling, cleaning and reassembling his rifle, trying to focus on anything but that dream. He looks up as Croizer enters, "You, um, you need something?"

It was weird for people to come into the hall in the middle of the night, more so when it was the people who lived around the edge of town. Levi doesn't think he's seen this guy in months.

Everything Raju had been feeling when he slept, when he woke, has been forced into his quick, purposeful movements, into the tension in his posture, into a manner and a mind which has long blinded itself to things like tired and never grew any tolerance, inside himself, for anything like fear.

If there's something humming through him anyway, some tight feeling there's no sense in naming which wants him to move then let it move him, let it push him forward into solving this. If he can only figure out how.

The question drops an obstacle into the path of his thoughts, diverting the road. His eyelids flutter, a little surprised. His mouth opens a little to speak, and for a moment he doesn't. Something logical, rational, that's what he'd been so focused on finding. But the man says, an omen, and Raju realises that he can't deny it. What else would something like this be, shared among so many?

"Of what?" he asks finally, voice quieter and more plaintive than a moment ago. He shakes his head, trying to put the force back into his tone. His right hand starts slapping the back of his notebook against his thigh, repeatedly and fast. "I would have called it a metaphor, if I were any place else, but here..."

The young boy with the rifle. Crozier acknowledges him with a very gentle tip of his head.

"No, I don't need..."

He grimaces, checking the door to make sure that it's closed again. There's something almost unsettling about Levi -- it's probably the age and the fact that he's holding weapon.

"Was your sleep interrupted?"

"Y-yeah, but that's normal. Um." He hesitates for a few moments, focusing on his work.

"I don't see you here often. Why, uh, what made you stop by?"

The agitation is evident, the shared dread of just not knowing. A shared dream seems to remove the idea that any of this was random, that any of this happened by chance and not some all powerful being.

"And it occurred between more than one of us. There's reason to believe that others experienced something similar."

Not for casual conversation, no, he doesn't come into town very often. It isn't as though that people make him nervous, but it aches something fierce to face this kind of struggle once more.

"I was unsettled by something," he answers, pulling his hood off of his head. "How fares the town?"

Unsettled by something? That could be a problem. "Fine, as far as I know. Normal. What unsettled you?"

On his way to the community center Crozier comes across the familiar silhouette of Harry Goodsir, also roused out of bed by something horrific and possibly trudging through the snow in the hope to soothe his own worries. He waits a beat and then calls out to him softly.

He frowns softly, stomping his feet and then walking as softly as possible towards the fireplace. "I suppose it doesn't matter now, especially as all seems well."

"No, it does. If there's something new out there we should all know about it.

Raju nods, taking a slow breath, looking around. Of course the other man wouldn't know any more than Raju himself does. There's no reason he would have those kinds of answers. Omen is only an idea, if the only one yet that fits. The sound of rustling paper slows as Raju slows his jittering hand.

"From the way we all woke, I think so. And things a couple have said. I haven't asked for too much yet. I wanted to get down all the details—" He raises the notebook, then drops it back down to tap at his thigh again. "—while I still remembered."

His free hand rubs its fingers restlessly against each other as he takes a slow breath again, trying to slow himself along with it. He holds it for a moment, focuses. "Do you remember? What did you see?"

"It isn't what's out there," Crozier amends. "It was a dream. A nightmare. It was...startling."

Crozier decides that maybe they should be sitting for this conversation. They're both addled, but pacing would only make matters worse, unnerve them further. As far as they know there's no action to take here, only to sit with the thoughts that were put into their heads.

If he dwells on that part for too long, a town-wide dream, he might lose his mind.

He sits down in the area where Raju had been catching his thoughts before they disappear. "I remember feeling cold, tasting blood. Then...skulls of an animal. I could feel a sense of dread, deep and unyielding."

Rorschach was still a little wary of the pirate. Men like that didn't change and he'd show his true colors eventually. But he wasn't about to punish the man for no reason and Edward had helped get him out of his restraints when they'd been tied up together, so for now he was merely keeping a close eye on him, which was not so easy when someone else in the town was parkouring around the rooftops.

So he took the seat offered, looking more restless than usual. Fingers tapping his sides or anything that was close by, head snapping far too quickly at any noise that was nearby. "You had it too?" He wasn't sure if he was relieved or more worried it hadn't just been him experiencing the nightmare.

First things first.

Edward finds his way to Goodsir’s while the fellow’s still out, the stump of his ring finger bound up in bandages. He should’ve done this earlier, really. He’s—fine, he’s well enough, he cut off the finger himself with his own blade before the frostbite could get even worse than it did, but. Well. He could use a second opinion. Someone who actually, y’know, knows what he’s doing.

And to top it off there’s that damn nightmare, still rattling around his head. He shivers.

Goodsir’s not here. Must be checking on people. Edward decides to wait, settling into a chair and opening a book he’d found in the house he’d claimed for his own—some tawdry romance, dog-eared, well-loved. He can’t see the appeal, honestly, but he’s halfway through it now and he might as well see it through.

At hearing that Levi had been through a nightmare as well, Rorschach ran his hand down his face, the black dots dispersing off to the sides for a moment at the sensation before they came back and started moving again in their usual patterns. This worried him and what it meant for this place.

"Describe it." He had to be certain their experiences had been the same before he delved any further into this. Before he drew conclusions, he needed hard data to fall back on.

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prelude

Rorschach | OTA cw: mention of PTSD nightmare symptoms

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closed to Billy Gibson

Crozier | OTA

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In community hall, OTA

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tw amputation

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