Participants:
| Scene Title | Decisions and Revisions |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Delia enters Tasha's dreams to show her the visions she's collected from other's dreams, so that Tasha can speak to her father about changing the future. |
| Date | October 18, 2010 |
Dreamscape
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
— TS Eliot, "The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock"
It’s hard to sleep when you know someone is going to be entering your dreams, Tasha finds. She tosses and turns and finally manages to drift off sometime around 1 a.m., curled up against Colette, who is unconscious to the world after a hard day of manual labor. Tasha’s mind is a restless place, pingponging around from worry to worry, fear to fear, some of them deep within her subconscious and no where near her waking mind’s consciousness.
The dream for a moment settles on a moment from her past, thanks to the most current conflict, knowing she has to ask her dad for an impossible favor, knowing that if she doesn’t succeed, children’s lives may hang in the balance. A karate dojo — Tasha herself small, perhaps seven years old, receiving a belt for her hard work. Her father and mother in the audience, clapping and beaming with pride. The smell of sweat and exertion lingers in the air, but it isn’t unpleasant, not when it comes with honest effort and exciting competition.
But, as Robert Frost said, nothing gold can stay — and the scene darkens. The dojo is suddenly invaded by men in masked suits, children are pulled from their parents and their teachers. Tasha herself is ripped from her father’s hands. Vincent turns into smoke.
This is the dream world that Delia enters — despite Tasha’s efforts to hide who she is, who Vincent is to her, her subconscious cannot hold this secret.
At first, there’s no sign of the dreamwalker. No indication that she is there at all, watching and waiting. Then, for just a second or two a thin ribbon of bright red hair is visible as it skips across the teen’s periphery. As the men in masked suits storm the building, she melts into view, filling a body and face to the swath of hair, the only thing she can’t always hide. Like Hokuto’s eyes or smile.
The moment she is fully formed, the scene stops, as though time is halted for everyone but the teen and the redhead. “I get it.” A simple statement as she looks at the puff of smoke and then to Tasha herself. “You should be proud of him, he’s a really nice guy.” Even with her fears of arrest, Delia still smiles toward the wisp of frozen smoke. “I’ll show you…”
Wiping her hand in the air, the dreamwalker smudges a window to a different scene. The redhead is sitting in a chair while she relays a story to a stern man, Tasha’s father. There’s no sound, but Delia is smiling as she watches it. “He’s the one that arrested me, you know. I would have followed through with registration… Except for my dad.” Turning toward Tasha, the nurse’s grin widens to the crooked one, “So we’ve got something in common, huh?”
The little girl grows into a full-sized Tasha, if one can call the 5’2”, 105-pound girl “full-sized.” It’s as tall as she is going to grow, after all. She smiles and nods to the redhead, though the worry that’s ever-present on her face of course doesn’t fade. “He doesn’t approve of me, doing this,” she says softly. “We haven’t been close for a long time. But I can’t betray him — I can ask him if he’ll let you show him, but … “ her voice trails off in doubtfulness. That Vincent would let someone in his mind is unfathomable to his daughter, who hasn’t been let in his life for so long.
Of course, that’s as much her fault as his.
“I’m sorry he’s the one who arrested you, but I’m glad you don’t hate him for it. Colette seems to think he’s not a bad guy either, but… but he won’t listen to me when I tell him about the visions.”
“It’s okay, I should have listened to my dad… The second time anyway. For the longest time I was too scared to register, you know? I was scared to be on a list.” The redhead turns toward Tasha and gives her a little grimace. “By the time the deadline came around, I changed my mind… I wanted to register but Dad already told me that he might be in trouble. So I tried to get around registration by faking being normal.”
The Delia in the window is crying, not attractively whatsoever… there’s tears and snot pretty much everywhere. Vincent is handing her tissues and though the neutral expression is still on his face, he’s not treating her with the disdain that she expected.
“I went into hiding a few hours later, I couldn’t follow through with what I was supposed to.” There’s an expression of regret on the young woman’s face before she swipes her hand through the air, dismissing the window in a smokey wisp that looks a lot like the frozen Vincent. “If you talk to him, can you tell him I’m sorry? I wanted to do what he said… but it’s my dad. I couldn’t get on a list to be used against him. When everything is right again, tell him that I promise I’ll do the right thing but right now, I have to keep my dad safe.”
Taking Tasha’s hand, Delia closes her eyes and the room disappears around them. What they are left with is an elegant bedroom occupied by a crimson haired sleeping beauty. Gillian. “This is her dream,” or what Hokuto made for her. “Was her dream… The reason why I think that the Lighthouse is going to be raided.” The images are so vivid that it’s almost impossible to tell whether they’re in the sleeper’s mind right now or not.
«…orphanage known as the Lighthouse, located within the expanding Reclaimed Zone on Staten Island's southern shores. Authorities apprehended the orphanage's manager, Brian Fulk earlier this morning along with an undocumented number of Evolved children, some believed to be unregistered and being willfully kept from the government's eye.»
A chill runs down Gillian's spine as she hears her brother's name on the news broadcast, hears the sound of everything falling apart.
«According to sources within the Department of Homeland Security, Fulk was arrested in connection for association with the Company, having operated under the alias Brian Winters within the rogue organization.»
The lights in the bathroom flicker for a moment, the wiring in the apartment might need to be looked at.
«Authorities removed hundreds of illegal automatic weapons from the premesis, kept in the orphanage's basement, along with illegal drugs and drug paraphenalia. At least one dose of the Evolved targeted drug Refrain was found on site, leading to speculation that the children may have been exposed to the substance.»
Everything goes smokey and the young woman and the teen are left in a fog. “She believed it… I think maybe that was part of her vision.”
The tears in Delia’s eyes bring tears to Tasha’s, along with a pang of something not unlike jealousy for the compassion shown to the woman by Vincent — how many times has she cried only to have him leave the room in a cloud of vapor? But she knows it’s childish and petty, and she knows that she has freedoms that Delia does not, simply due to genetic chance. ‘I’ll tell him,” she whispers, wiping her own eyes. Is she crying in real life? Will her pillow be wet when she wakes?
The shift to Gillian’s vision has her shivering as well. Brian and Gillian are friends - well, acquaintances, really — of hers, and to see Gillian in pain and fear at hearing Brian’s name on the news report is like being there with the woman. “Did they plant that? I know there are things in the basement, probably weapons, but I don’t think anyone there would have Refrain, not anymore, not near the kids. Unless one of the kids found some on Staten somewhere and brought it back. That’s so unfair — they can’t … they can’t displace all those kids only because of that,” Tasha says indignantly. “We can tell the Lighthouse people to move the weapons and to make sure nothing is there to be found, but the fact they’re raiding it in the first place doesn’t make any sense. I’ll ask him if he knows why, and … when.” November 8th should be when, but things have changed since the visions. People have changed.
“I’m not sure they’re just going to be displaced,” Delia says absently, not that she isn’t paying attention to Tasha’s lament but she is staring at something through the mist. Something moving toward them, buildings? Brooklyn. When the haze clears, they’re not being approached, they are approaching, except without moving their feet.
There’s gunfire. A lot of it.
“Somewhere between then and my vision, Kaylee is going to get shot.” The dreamwalker’s voice becomes a little shakier, like she’s trying to avoid some sort of outburst as she watches the scene unfold. It’s not a vision, it’s an extrapolation.
There’s Kaylee, two men, and a passel of faceless children. The guns are being fired at them. “She’s going to get shot trying to save some kids…” Delia continues, watching as the ground slowly paints to red, the black and white picture finally getting a splash of color. That same color spurts across the two dreamers as though they were being spatter painted. “My vision ends with me offering to help her.”
There is a gasp from Tasha as that vibrant color splashes across them. The artist is affected by the imagery of that red hue against the black and white landscape. It’s not so different from her own vision; nothing seemed as vivid, so garish as that knife blade, painted scarlet but with blood, not paints.
“My vision was Queens. Not so far away,” Tasha says, turning to look to what she thinks is the north, wondering if for some reason Colette and Tasha and Tamara were trying to get to Kaylee and the children. She doesn’t know. She can’t know. Their visions are just a moment in the entire day — what was before, what was supposed to come after — they will never know. Because, as Colette and Tasha keep promising, they will change it.
“A lot of people are supposed to get hurt on that day,” Tasha says with a whisper. Colette. Joanna. So many others. “We’re going to stop it, okay, Delia? I promise. I’ll tell my dad… I … I asked him before, but maybe if he knows that it’s people who I care about… and little kids… I don’t know. Maybe he’ll listen. Maybe it will be more real.” Her eyes fill with tears again.
“He’ll be in trouble too, I think.” Delia says quietly. She looks down at her bare feet and grimaces at their white against the black of the pavement. “If I’m guessing right… I don’t think it’s just the Ferrymen that will be in trouble. I think it’s going to be all evolved people. It’ll start with just us, but look at what happened to my dad. He spent his whole life over on that side of the fence… then they turned on him.”
There’s a dog fight in the distance, a pack of large rottweilers and doberman pincers tearing at one lame one, an old brown german sheppard. It tries to drag itself out of their reach, but there’s too many of them and they’re too fast. Some of the faceless figures turn toward the raucous and the guns go off again, silencing all of them.
“I’m sorry, I wish it was prettier. I could leave you with something else if you want… Something better.” Something light and fluffy like a high school homecoming game with cheerleaders and football players. A museum in Paris with colorful paintings and lovers sharing coffee from a paper cup. A beach with palm trees, hot white sand and a drink with an umbrella. The images float by like plastic bags in the wind, leaving Tasha and Delia to the mercy of the fog. At least it’s no longer Red Hook… or even Queens.
“Life isn’t pretty. Parts of it are, of course, but it’s what I signed up for,” Tasha murmurs. “If he doesn’t listen — I don’t know. You know, it’s funny, I sometimes think he’d love me more if I were Evolved, too. Maybe part of me does this because of him. I don’t know. I mean, he’s not … he’s never someone I’d think I could protect or help by being Ferry, but I want to help people who need it. Like the kids.” She wraps her arms around herself, as if to ward off that chill from the fog.
“Thanks for understanding. Even before you knew. Unless, maybe, you guessed,” she adds in a small voice, glancing up at Delia.
“There’s stuff you had to keep secret, it’s just one more for me.” Delia says with a smile as she fades out of view. The scenery changes to a picturesque little cafe somewhere in SoHo where Tasha stands near a table for two. “Don’t worry…” the voice continues as she disappears from view. “I won’t tell anyone.”