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[misterbkeele.livejournal.com]

Date: April 5, 2003, night
Status: Private (Baraq, Ishtar, Primoris) (Complete)
Setting: Baraq and Ishtar's respective rooms; the Dreaming
Summary: A goddess and a demon share a nightmare, under Primoris' watch.


Barnaby lifted the lid of the steamer trunk and wrinkled his nose. He had been letting things go. With a gesture the stack of clothes was clean, but the musty smell remained; probably it had seeped into the wood. He left the trunk open, throwing the windows open for good measure. The night was chill but not uncomfortably so, and he slept in a bundle of sheets and comforter.

---

Memories are a haphazard thing, even in the best of times; you never recall them how they went. Like a broken clay bowl reassembled in not quite the right way. Dreams, now, dreams complicate matters even more.

The demon moved through the masquerade party, celebrating—what? The royal marriage? A newborn princess? A birthday? The nobility barely needed the excuse to splurge. He smiled and nodded at each person he passed. A woman wearing a frothy wig and a violently fuchsia half-mask dimpled back at him. Her skin was downy as a peach, and a white-tipped tail twitched under her skirts.

There was a heady scent filling the ballroom, too sweet, too cloying, and he needed to get out. He pushed his way through the crowded revelry, past the bull-headed footmen at the doors and the mouse-drawn carriages.

He never could stand polluted air for long.

Presently, he found himself in a different time and place, though still in France, still wearing the fancy-dress from the party. The trade in opiates had bloomed all over Europe, barely needing demonic encouragement. What wouldn't humans do, to themselves and each other? Still, here he was in one of hundreds of smoky little dens in the city, talking to one of his contacts in the business. If you didn't keep an eye on things... He shook hands with the smooth-faced dealer and left.

Now here he was, in the flat he kept his lodgings in while he was in Paris. There was a mustiness somewhere, which was strange—the furniture here wasn't that old, was it? He shook his head, bemused, and lifted a cup to his lips. The black tar dissolved into the drink smelled like vinegar and tasted of cut grass and liquorice.

Comments

edited, sorry

[safehouse-guest.livejournal.com]

Primoris would have frowned if he could. This was... odd. Somehow the veils between dreams had been weakened, it seemed. The demon's and goddess's nightmares were merging, and they seemed aware of each other.

He wondered whether to abandon them and try to repair it, but paused. Perhaps this might be interesting, seeing how they reacted to each other. Experiencing others' fears; it was not something he had considered before, but the possibilities were intriguing. Fear evolved, after all. And who was he to deny the nature of fear?

He decided to simply watch, for the time being. Though perhaps... yes, a little more fear wouldn't hurt... There. And the darkness swirled around them.

[misterbkeele.livejournal.com]

He took one step, two, and abruptly stumbled back on the doorframe. He had only half-heard the reply; a wave of dizziness had overtaken his senses. There was a spike of self-disgust behind the haze: Why was he allowing this to happen to himself? He was more than the meat and chemicals of this human form, so why was he at the mercy of them? (Again?)

And perhaps he had lost control of this body, perhaps he had permanently damaged it, and he would always be this way, overtired and confounded and weak as a wet noodle. And hey, who was to say he wasn't hallucinating as well, from the elaborate lace and bubbly wine of the masquerade to the airy Parisian flat (even now dissolving into inky black behind him) and the dark woman who had spoken?

He gave a high bark of laughter edged with hysteria. Perfect, this was perfect.

He might as well talk to his hallucinations. "My name is--" How odd, the name on his lips wasn't the one he ought to have been using. It wasn't French, for starters. His real one would have to do. (What language was he speaking, for that matter?) "--is Baraq," he said, "Did you know, you're trailing blood behind you, have you noticed?"

[lady-of-nineveh.livejournal.com]

"It won't ever wash off." She said sadly, toying with the fat braids of her wig. Her eyes flickered up at the angular man before her. He didn't seem to belong here any more than she did, there was something around the eyes... She grinned, suddenly. He was real. Baraq was real.

"I really don't like this place at all... I mean, why just re-hash old nightmares? I've moved beyond all this." She took a deep shuddering breath and gave the wig a sharp tug. The headdress came tumbling off with it, and Ishtar dropped the whole mess to the ground. She rubbed blood-stained fingers through her short hair. "Much better."

She began patting herself down, checking the voluminous folds of her tunic, "I really, really need...Aha!" She suddenly grinned, all eyes and teeth, as she drew out an anachronistic zippo lighter and a gold cigarette case. "You look like you could use one too."

She lit up a pair of cigarettes, and proffered one to him, only slightly stained with red lipstick. "You look a bit out of it all. Are you high? Weren't you just at a masquerade?"

[misterbkeele.livejournal.com]

"I don't smoke," he said automatically. He pulled off his own mask to rub his forehead, the papier mache crumpling as he did so. The rest of Ishtar's words took longer to process. His eyes were clouded.

"What are you talking about? I haven't gone anywhere, this is my flat..." His voice trailed off when he saw the way the surroundings were shifting, draped in shadowy curtains, and yes, he had been at the masquerade just a moment ago. How had he forgotten? "This doesn't make any sense," Baraq muttered, half to himself. "No. I'm seeing things. You, this, everything's just a--"

He would have gone on, but a new wave of nausea brought him painfully to his knees, and he clamped his hands over his mouth. "Shit."

[lady-of-nineveh.livejournal.com]

"More fool you," Ishtar grumbled, stubbing out one of the cigarettes in the sticky droplets of blood on her palm and slipping it back into the case. She rolled perfumesd smoke around her mouth, slipping it back out into the protean air through carmine lips.

She watched Baraq's mask crumple into dimensions she couldn't fathom, while the walls shifted and twisted in the darkness at crazed angles. "This place is enough to give you motion sickness. I really don't like it at all," she added petulantly. Still, she sighed deeply, smoke billowing around her, it could be worse. At least she wasn't on her own with this evil, sickening darkness. Even a high and insane man... person... being... whatever he was, who talked to himself and seemed to think she was imaginary was better than no-one.

She looked across at him as he doubled over. "Oh bugger." She crouched down and looked him in the eye. "Look at me, breathe. Slowly. Don't throw up..."

[misterbkeele.livejournal.com]

He bit down hard on his lower lip, focusing on the pain, Ishtar's voice, the floor below him (at least it felt like solid ground, so long as he didn't look at it), anything that wasn't the spinning in his head. The stream of disjointed sentences hadn't stopped, were only half-muffled: "This isn't right. I stopped. I got better. It shouldn't have a hold over me."

Baraq met her eyes, and the litany stopped. He dropped his hands into his lap. After a long pause, his next words were halting and chosen with care, but steady for once. "I would think," he said, "with these surroundings, I was in Cocytus, but I would remember being recalled. And you don't feel like a human soul or a demon." He hesitated a moment. "You're from Mesopotamia, aren't you?"

[lady-of-nineveh.livejournal.com]

"It's flattering to be acknowledged as real, Baraq," Ishtar relaxed, her companion seemingly in no imminent danger of violent illness. "Yes, Mesopotamia, Babylon, Sumeria - Ishtar, Astarte, Inanna... all me, at least now it is."

She stood up and inspected the looming darkness with what she hoped was a critical eye. "I'm as lost as you are... but I'm sure you're right about Cocytus. At the very least I'd need someone with a boat to let me in." She wrinkled her nose. "And I don't think we're alone."

[misterbkeele.livejournal.com]

He nodded. Part of him still thought it was a century ago and wanted to curl on the floor until the spinning stopped, but it had taken a step back.

Baraq got to his feet as well. If he couldn't be in control of himself, at least he could fake it in front of a stranger.

"I can't sense anyone else," he said. "We should... we should try and get out of this place."

[safehouse-guest.livejournal.com]

This nightmare was not turning out the way Primoris had hoped, but it was opening up new possibilities. Shared fears. Being trapped in another's nightmare. The blending of fears.

The fear of the goddess and the demon was so deliciously strong, swirling around them in nearly tangible eddies. And oh, how he loved it when people tried to pretend they weren't scared. This was turning out to be more productive than a normal nightmare.

And if he could pull down the walls between individual dreams, could he also pull down the walls separating his Dreaming from the waking world? The sheer possibility of that... nightmares spilling over to the waking world, the resulting fear and chaos...

The demon would have his wish granted; Primoris decided it was time to end this nightmare, and the darkness began to lift. He had bigger plans to make, it seemed.

[misterbkeele.livejournal.com]

The shadows were ebbing away but the swirling of the environment was, if anything, getting worse. The surroundings were breaking down: Here a scrap of taffeta from a party dress was flying by, there a tile stained black with blood shattering on a wall. Glass and pieces of sky (both day and night) and broken pipes rained down on him. He screamed, cowering into himself --

-- inside a snarl of blankets, lips pressed tightly against each other.

In moments he was out of his bed, bent over a sink, retching with nothing in his stomach to throw up.

"Just once," he said to nothing in particular, "I'd like to wake up without having to run to the bathroom. Is that so much to ask?" His voice barely shook at all.