ataraxionlogs | o14. quasi closed.

If it bothers William to be prodded for further detail, he doesn't let it on. Demons are sensitive business. Among the former residents of the Tranquility more than most populations, one imagines. They turned the tables on the fell creature that was sucking on their minds with a psychic tentacle, but it had taken quite a bit of doing. Wiiliam clasps his hands over his knees and the current of his thoughts generates a passing drove of bluejays. "He gave me my abilities ages and ages ago," he says, eventually. "And he hasn't taken them back now, mind you.

"But it was better to have his-- guidance when I did." He hunches slightly, his eyes focusing on Charles' face as he becomes less occupied with finding words and rooting through concepts. "I had about sixty percent my current cognitive capacity when I was first starting out. He bumped me up, and was there to talk me through it. The dream stuff was earlier than that, and he showed me how. I guess not with as clear um, ethics as he should have." He has the good grace and dream powers finesse to turn his face slightly pink when he says this, dropping his eyes ruefully to study Charles' period-appropriate shoes. He scratches a cough out of his throat. "But I'd remember, that the powers aren't mine.

"He's letting me use them. And I'm just-- um.

"I'm still me. Apart from the weird magical shit that I can do." His fingers flex straight then settle again. A nervous tic that doesn't actually exist in real life. He knows that this sort of notion must be rather different to the construction of mutant identity, though, and he can't predict how Charles will see that. He doesn't know that Charles has struggled with terrible qualms and problems of identity other than that.

"I don't know if I can undo the things that recon syndrome has done."

All of those words strung together, delivered with in this tone of delivery, don't gesture towards refusal, although Charles considers it within his rights to refuse. He doesn't know yet. Uncertainty is clear in his eyes, even in dreaming, and so he settles on a factual statement. "But if it's only as a result of syndrome rather than the syndrome itself--"

He turns, leans against the balcony railing. Lucid dreaming. He doesn't, himself, not naturally. He can minimally invade the dreams of others, and certainly watch them, but this is rather different. It all seems, at once, very fragile.

"What do you think he's up to in his absence? Or is he dormant?"

William seems to give this question the same weight he had the rest, silent for a moment, his expression distant, as if the thinking part of himself has dislocated and wandered off, leaving the talking part of him unavailable. It's a startling facsimile of real life, except that Charles can't hear the undercurrent of thoughts to it. It is, perhaps, the least realistic aspect of this subconscious simulation.

"I don't know," is the underwhelming answer that William eventually produces. He pushes himself off the railing, landing gently on the floor. His sandals whack around again, toes splaying to keep his balance. Somehow, though, he looks different than he did a few minutes ago. The clothes are darker. His trousers are cambric instead of khakis, and the birdsong has dwindled a little. In absence of Charles' attention, the voices that were climbing over each other inside the house have dissipated, off to make-believe lessons and errands. William forgets to hold the cotton skein clouds in the sky, so there aren't anymore.

"I don't think time moves the same for him. He's older than anybody else I've ever met, vampires included." William scratches his own ear, rueful. "Might of been he thought I hung up on him a bit and is busy thinking about molecular sciences. Or Zhou Dynasty poetry. Or sous-vide." A beat. "He might be dead."

His face is rather still when he says it. Composed, not happy.

It's quiet, now, and the sky is a plain, smooth dome of blue. Any moment now, he's going to be without his trousers. That would rather ruin the mood.

"And you believe, if he comes back, you'll--"

Charles sighs, almost annoyed at himself.

"I'm sorry, I don't mean to treat you with great suspicion without a straight forward yes or no, and the answer is probably. I suppose I'm just trying to understand what I'm agreeing to help with. My instinct is to suggest that you don't need something like that to guide you, but that's not very good advice if it's at the cost of repressing a sentient entity. Or denying something that's a part of you. At the same time, if you hurt people--"

The 'again' is pronounced silently.

"--then I'll be the one who agreed to helping a man become repossessed by a demon, world-specific understandings or no."

William's eyes move uneasily across the Englishman's face. Not panicking or anything quite like that, but distantly concerned about the intra-mutant conflict going on. He doesn't mind, of course, or at least he doesn't think himself sufficiently entitled to Charles' help, or urgent about his task, to be annoyed, himself. Of late, he has been enjoying the complacency that comes of having largely accepted his fate. It helps to have a small and light side of hope. Vegan hope. Low calories.

"It's a tough spot," he says, a touch of agreement in his voice. Dimly, he suspects he should be fighting harder for this, maybe have fabricated some sort of story about the psychic pain of the severed connection or something like that-- maybe Charles would believe that, if anybody could. It seems wrong to be dishonest, though, and he can't even in good conscience rate highly his guesstimated probability that he will feel much better if Guangtou is back. After all that has happened, he feels the least he owes Charles is not to lie, and embellish minimally. The most dishonest he can think to try is to look more human, so he scratches his leg a bit, opts not to fart, and then walks back toward the open window-door.

He doesn't go back inside. Just rests his back against the wall, glancing at the gardens, giving him some space. The nature of mutation, to stand on its own and define its owner, seems very different. "If you want to think about it for longer, I understand," he says. "I won't be a cock about it. I'm pretty sure I've got time, and it probably doesn't matter at all to Guangtou, whatever the fuck he's doing now." Making out with local girl demons. Or boy demons. He hopes that he isn't sucking face with the Tranquility's former inhabitant, however.

"I'd rather you did a better job of convincing me," is a little wry, a little joking. He doesn't know that William is faintly considering lying to him, a faint guilelessness to crooked, reddish smile that only just recalls the sassy teapot poses that can go with.

He remains lounging against parapet instead. "'No, the demon won't harm anyone, Charles', sort of like that."

It's silent, now. Charles considers the surroundings and his own lucidity, and nothing much changes. The sky seems a little greyer, and if he glanced over his shoulder, he suspects the fountain would be dry and flooded with weeds. The lawns unkempt. The sunlight whiter, somehow. The smell of New York rain from hours ago permeates the air. A decade of neglect settles subtle.

No not the teapot noo.

Yes.

Nooo. "The demon won't hurt anybody," William says quickly. He doesn't add, 'Last time, that was me, hurting anybody&mdash' there's a difference between lying and leaving out unnecessary, incriminating details, reminders of something that Charles is obviously already negotiating with internally already. "He's always been very gentle. Mostly he likes to watch." A beat. This abruptly seems incriminating, too, in the context of their past relations, so he says, "the human condition," pretending the pause was him simply spent searching his vocabulary for the proper word.

"All he's ever done is help me. And it ain't ever been at anybody else's expense, really. Recon syndrome was a whole other bollocks-- he didn't want it either."

There is the rise of one articulate eyebrow at the pause succeeding 'watch', but it smooths back out again along with further explanation.

Charles' study flicks downwards, considering the ground between them. It's one of those moments where he feels like he shouldn't, and knows he will anyway. The jury is out on whether it's actually one of his better qualities. But if he's learned anything in the last decade, it's that inaction is equally a choice one consciously makes, with its own set of consequences.

This isn't exactly the same, but-- "I'll help you. If I can."

William straightens, looks happy. Hopeful, almost. It's less reserved and unironic than most of his British compatriots usually engage in, but maybe that's merely a measure of William's gratitude. He steps toward the telepath and says, sincerely, "I think you can." His eyes are bright, his voice clear, the outline of his head and his shoulders contiguous with the backdrop of upstate New York in sepia. Details that start to warp as soon as they're observed.

Naturally, the first thing to grow are the shadows.

Charles' spins away from his feet like a snake. The recursive geometry of the railing lengthens like teeth, and the trees' silhouettes grow dark and high, linking together, straightening. Abruptly, the concave robin's egg curvature of the sky contracts into something far more tangible but equally circular. Charles remembers this. The vast and hollow heart of Cerebro, built to amplify the reach and intensity of his power well beyond its original grasp. Behind and before him, the walkway stretches out in a long ribbon. He's already halfway to the pedestal, the console there, and the crown on its silver cables, peculiarly clean of dust.

"Oh," William says, slightly behind him. He folds his arms over the chest of his red T-shirt, as if he can actually feel the mild but permeating chill inherent to the subterranean construction. "Cool."

For a moment, Charles isn't certain he even has form himself as shapes and colours bleed together to twist into something new, but no, here he is, feet solid on the walkway that he finds himself walking down without remembering thinking about it. He doesn't stop, either, even when William's voice echoes behind him, putting his hands on the helmet without yet lifting it from its cradle.

"Groovy," he suggests. Remus had made a face at that word. "You know what this place is, then."

William's eyes turn at him, thin slightly as if smiling. However, the rest of his face is rather indistinct in the half-light of the chamber for a moment, or maybe just from Charles' peripheral vision. The helmet and its cradle come cleaner into focus, its lines flowing in fixed paths around empty air but shaped to Charles' curly head. "I know it's where you go to look for people," he answers. "And I know it's got a name.

"A lot of people have got places like that in their minds. Remus' is a weird room in a castle with loads of rubbish in it. Maybe he's shown you before?" William puts his hands in his pockets, a muted shuffling of skin and fabric. "Heather didn't have a proper place, but she'd be carrying a bloody huge flashlight. Or a journal. Most of the time, people don't find what they're looking for in dreams." Dislocated sympathy tinges his voice. But the Marauders were long past the stilted symbolism of the chamber's safe stone walls, and Heather had ever searched through darkness for what she already knew she could not find.

People trick themselves in dreams. There's only so much William can do. "It's symbols, more than memories, exactly. I suppose white people haven't got too many symbols for happy things."

"Cerebro."

Charles picks up the helmet. Memory of how heavy it ought to be fills in expectation, although he's never stood on his feet in this place. He had refused, after he started to take the serum. Reality shifts, and he is seated in the motorised chair with its high back and quiet wheels, seamless that he doesn't remember, not really, that he'd been standing. Or that he could stand.

He glances past back at William. "Maybe it's you. I know for a while, the only thing I could bring out of people was pain. That wasn't their fault."

He reaches out to the panel, his hand at a hover as he realises most of the dials and switches don't matter here. Hefting the helmet, Charles lowers it onto his head, feeling more those points of pressure against his forehead, temple, the base of his skull, than he does its weight. Immediately, the tiles defining the great sphere around them seem to dissolve into abstract blackness. Questing into a void.

William accepts the deduction that that was what he was doing, placing fault, without argument. He thinks about it for a moment, while he watches the back of Charles' head. While Charles touches the panel and awakens the vast machine around them; while the spherical walls give way to light and pattern. He would have guessed that the rather plain architectural presentation wasn't going to stay around.

"I should think about that."

He opens his eyes within the dream, and then he opens his mind without.

Cerebro sears red, abruptly, like emergency lights or a darkroom. William has enough time to say, "I'm sorry if anything," before Erik's face breaks into view, his skin pulled tight and white around his jaw, his eyes massive with hysteria. The Tranquility bedroom echoes with his screams— Charles, Charles,— the deeper, masculine tone of his voice a roar that nearly buries the screech of the woman's voice underneath. Mystique's. Mystique's blue face bent into a rictus, and her arm ripped in two, that space where her crew number tattoo used to reside now splitting apart cell by cell, a black lattice of nanites forming together like so many ants. The coin is on the nightstand, trembling with Erik's magnetokinesis; the answer he doesn't want.

Erik's voice breaks a little, warps, distorts, and then it's not Charles' name he's screaming after all, the echoes fading through the walls and the corridor inverting around a different set of syllables. Jeremy! Elena's thin legs pound the floor, her frame moving down the corridor with the preternatural speed granted by vampirism. She can hear a thin and struggling heartbeat, emanating through the walls of the ship; muffled cries, lungs and heart fighting the urge to breathe. She bursts into the gravcouch zone, and her brother is there, with her dark eyes and dark hair, suspended in blue fluid. His mouth stretches open, empty of a breathing tube, and her terror burns as if she is alive after all.

(It could be William.) (A little.)

Charles' hands lock white around the arms of his wheelchair immediately after scarlet floods the space. Red has certain associations, for those who weathered the Tranquility for a year and a half.

Familiar voices and faces saturating sensory input are not better.

This isn't Cerebro, but then again, this isn't planet Earth that he's searching. (Somewhere, in a dark tent, his heartbeat has kicked up, and he breathes noisier into bedding. Erik can sleep through a lot, when he manages it.) He's not sure what he's looking at until he realises it must be dreaming, regardless, just not his own dreaming -- painterly layers of memory rather than the glossy impressions of the real thing.

"Do you dream, by yourself?"

The question is put out there. Maybe his own avatar says it, with mouth sounds and everything. Maybe it's his own telepathy, transmitted wordlessly.

Elena's fists thump dully against glass. A crack spiders away from the tiny knot of her hand.

"No. Not anymore," William says. "Used to."

She hits the glass again, and a stream of blue fluid spurts out. Within the gravcouch, Jeremy's eyes meet his sister's through the pane. His hands scrabble on the other side, starfishing white and helpless; his throat convulses.

But then it's Heather's throat convulsing. Fatigue burns in her lungs and her feet are getting heavier, but she has to run because she has to find-- "Takeshi!" It is, absurdly, some form of a primary school that running steps are taking her through. There's a child's laughter bouncing around the empty bend of the corridor, but by the time she stumbles there, he's gone. At the end of the hallway, the doors are open. There's a car pulling away from the curb, and Takeshi's red backpack winks through the window. The counselor's voice follows her. "Mrs. Mason," he says. "In the future you will have to leave the panda at home."

When she remembers home, she remembers lying in her own blood while a stranger steps over her. Or is that her father below, as the stranger stinks of gunmetal as he carries her away? She didn't know, at five-years-of-age, that a body can hold as much blood as what's spreading over the floor now, jolting vague, viscous ripples when her father's hand spreads to reach--

—for the Muggle alarm clock on his bedstand. The swipe of Remus' hand is too haphazard; he knocks it off onto the floor, where it flips over like a turtle and upends an empty whisky bottle on the way. In this dream, Remus is young. His apartment is grey and quiet with growing colonies of undisturbed dust, but the memory is fraught with green flashes of light, imagined screams, the probability that James had dropped his wand in the final spasm of death. Remus half-falls away from sheets that he'd forgotten to pull over himself anyway. His foot slides haphazardly across the floor, and nausea lurches up his throat.

He'd forgotten the paper he'd discarded down there beside the assortment of finished drinks and derelict timekeeping device. Sirius' head thrown back in the headlining photograph, maniacal laughter ripping out of his open mouth.

"Sometimes I feel like I ain't missing out on much."

o14. quasi closed.

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cw horrible things happening to children and other nightmare matters