Participants:
| Scene Title | It's the End of the World as we Know It (and I feel fine!) |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Delia and Jaiden, in dreams, discuss the visions they had about November 8th. |
| Date | October 18, 2010 |
Gun Hill — Delia's Apartment
It was well after bedtime when Jaiden slipped into the apartment and Delia was already asleep when he got in. She was already out and about and couldn’t feel him slip in beside her. Upon her predawn return, the arms around her cause her to nestle in against him and finally open her eyes.
The glow of the orange and purple sky through the thin curtain is a sight that she’s seen before in a painting, one of Tasha’s. As she watches the sun rise, her fingers trail light lines across Jaiden’s skin, tickling him just a little. Maybe she’s trying to wake him up, it could be that she’s just trying to let him know that she knows he’s there.
It’s such a peaceful way to spend a morning. With the deadline to doomsday quickly approaching, the young woman isn’t certain how many more she’ll be able to spend like this. Every second is appreciated while there’s still time. Turning in his arms, she places a soft kiss on his forehead and whispers those three little words, not loud enough to wake him up.. but hopefully to reach him in whatever he’s dreaming right now.
The man, wearing just about nothing to bed, as is Delia, his clothes piled on the floor just inside the door of the bedroom where he shed them the night before, shifts slightly, his eyes fluttering open after a moment, a soft breath escaping as he wakes just barely. “Love you too…” his soft voice intones, the man shifting slightly, one arm curling around Delia’s shoulders, both hidden beneath the blankets, a cocoon of warmth in the cool of the apartment. An ember glowing in the dark.
Jaiden had been preparing for the journey to wherever they were going. Trips to the shooting range and the Army Surplus store, raiding the armory at Redbird for old weapons that were period specific and in need of a little repair, and keeping a shop in working order - catching up so he could get behind for however long Hiro kept Delia and him in the past. It’s wearing him out.
His eyes flutter closed, the man almost falling back asleep, his hand resting on Delia’s belly, holding her tight against him, his lips brushing over her forehead. “Don’t want to wake up. Want to stay here, with you.”
“Don’t wake up, go back to sleep…” Delia whispers, kissing his cheeks and lips softly, “I’ll join you there…” Unfortunately, given everything she’s been charged with doing in the present, the redhead hasn’t had the time to prepare for the past. Aside from buying a few packages of white tube socks, she now has forty pair to bring with her. None of them decorated with monkeys.
Her fingers play lightly through his hair as she attempts to lull him back to sleep. The moment he drifts off, she is waiting there, in that same white dress and wild curly hair. Smiling just for him.
It doesn’t take much to lull Jaiden back to sleep. The touch on his brow causes his face to relax, his breathing going slower, more evenly, until he’s back in dreamland where Delia awaits. His dress is similar - not a dress, but something from his youth. Shorts with pockets on the sides and a white shirt with pockets on the chest. When you’re a boy in the outback, you can never have too many pockets for pocketknives, fish hooks, rocks, and other bits and bobs. He’s not a boy now, though. He’s the same Jaiden she knows in the real, but here it’s a dream.
The landscape spreads around them like a blanket thrown over the earth, grasses swaying in the light breeze that seems to come from behind each one of them, sending wisps of hair twisting cutely as the air dances around them. “I always can truthfully say you’re the girl of my dreams because, voila, here you are.” He steps closer, bending to tangle his fingers in her hair, to give her a gentle kiss. “How are you doing so far? I’d like to sit down with you sometime and go through the bag I’ve got packed for you.”
“We can make time when you wake up,” is the soft reply as Delia tilts her head into his hand and closes her eyes as their lips touch. When she opens them again to look at him, there’s worry in her eyes. “We don’t have much of that left, do we?” She whispers, drawing closer to the Australian to wrap her arms around him.
“Jaiden, I’m scared…” As the redhead’s anxiety grows, the sky darkens around them, storm clouds puff out and stretch across the sky giving it a gray-green tinge. The color of hail and tornadoes. Everything except for the sky melts around them, the field, blanket, grass, the light breeze turning into a gale. The concrete is hard under their bare feet as his neighborhood, Red Hook, crumbles up into view. Squinting at their surroundings, Delia’s hold on Jaiden tightens.
“What are you scared of?” Jaiden asks as the world changes around him. Sure, he’s a bit nervous when the tornadoes and bruise-green skies start to boil around him, but he knows Delia is here and all this is under her control. She would never hurt him, intentionally or no.
His arms hold her tightly to him, cradling her almost, a bulwark against the terrors outside. The Red Hook neighborhood springs from the earth, the grasses and blue skies melting away like a sugar sculpture in the rain, running down grime-filled gutters and into drains lined with dark iron grates. “This is Red Hook. A darker version of it, I can tell.” He smiles, bending to embrace her in strong arms. “I’m never going to leave your side, Delia.”
Faceless ghosts mill around them, the feeling of fear so thick in the air that it could be cut with a knife. All of them converging toward the water, toward boats. “It’s my vision,” Delia says as her own red hair comes into a view, crimson red against a sea of gray and black. Even her face and clothing are shades of gray. She seems lost, alone, and frightened.
“They’re going to load us onto the boats soon,” the dreamwalker says as they watch her likeness call out soundlessly. Before being pushed onto one of them, she turns toward the two dreamers, looking right through them, then she stumbles only to be caught by a kindly woman. It’s someone who gives her a smile before huddling in with a child. “I met Kaylee here…” Delia says, hugging Jaiden even tighter. “… She’s going to get shot, and I have to help her.”
“I didn’t see this part in my vision. Only the beginning. When the world went to hell. When I fell.” Jaiden nods soundlessly, still holding Delia tightly, watching the show as it unfolds, powerless to stop it or to change it in any way.
Except that by witnessing it, it already has changed. Whatever reason this riot happened, hopefully the shifts in the past by those who saw the future was enough to make this world uncertain to ever have occurred. One can only hope….pray…that the riots will not happen. That people won’t die.
That Jaiden won’t fall to an uncertain fate from a helicopter circling Manhattan Island…
“What happened leading up to this? Do you know?”
“No,” she answers, still clinging to him tightly. “I saw some dreams… The Lighthouse is going to be raided and the news report in the dream said that they’ll find weapons and … other things.” She doesn’t know if the other things are true, she’s hoping they aren’t. Looking up at him, she furrows her brow. “I didn’t see you in my vision, what did you see?”
As much as she would love to change her own, she can’t without leaving someone she considers a friend to die. “I’m going to be here November 8th, where did you see yourself?”
It’s obvious that he didn’t see himself with her, not if they were separated in her own vision. “Were you safe?”
“No.” Jaiden shakes his head. “I wasn’t.”
The scene changes after a moment, the ground melting away to show sky beneath their bare feet before a helicopter fades into view around them. The pair are sitting, buckled in, looking at Jaiden, every bit the reporter, almost hanging out of the side of the helicopter, taking pictures of the riot as it happens with his seemingly unlimited capacity digital camera. He’s buckled in securely by a gordian knot of cables and wires, lashed to the helicopter almost. He turns to look at the seated pair before saying something….something about not going down there, when the entire helicopter lurches, as if it was hit by a giant fist. Jaiden loses his balance and without a yelp, falls out of the helicopter, the harnesses failing as the mooring they were attached to gives way.
Jaiden sits there impassively, the *whup whup whup* of the chopper stopping instantly as the scene is paused, the pair sitting on the uncomfortable bench. The only thing you can see left of Jaiden is his hat, balanced precariously on the side of the chopper. If the scene continued, it would blow away into the city. “I don’t know what happened after I fell. If I live. If I die. What caused the chopper to jerk like that.” His eyes close. “I’m scared too, Delia. It’s okay to be scared, because this is a scary thing.”
Delia’s eyes squint to thin slits as she attempts to keep her tears from spilling over. “Don’t.” She whispers choking back all of the words that flood into her mind. “Don’t go anywhere near a helicopter, please. Stay with me.” The dream walker looks up at Jaiden again turning her head away from the horrible scene, refusing to watch it.
Changing her vision though, even that much, would it stop Kaylee from being shot? Would it just give her an extra set of hands as she tried to save the blonde’s life? Would it make a difference at all. “They’re getting ready for the worst, I am too. I’m packing up everything but I don’t know where to put it. I don’t know what’s going to happen to Lydia, if she even knows there’s going to be a war.” That is what this is, isn’t it? A war, complete with refugees.
It’s not every day you get to see the man you love plummet to his seeming death, but there it is, the scene frozen. Since this is Jaiden’s dream, he changes it a little, moving them from that helicopter in the middle of the city sky to the shore of a lake in the mountains with a view of a valley that’s lined with snow. It’s cool, but thanks to it being a dream and having a handy campfire nearby, it’s warm enough to have bare feet and bare anything else if they wanted, thanks to the big blanket spread out. A good memory to wipe away the taste of the bad.
Jaiden nods. “If I can. The Ferry may have me at my place to hide evacuees from the Lighthouse or other safehouses. Apparently they’re all going to be raided, and since mine is new, no-one knows where it is and won’t until they need to come hide.” Jaiden goes quiet for a moment. “If you need a spot to hide your things…we can figure something out pretty quick. Easiest thing….we find a spot upstate. Go camping. Take all that you want to hide with us, and rent a climate-controlled storage shed…pay for six months…a year…and then when the situation has calmed down, we go get it.”
“Including you?” Delia grins, her mood turning just a little lighter, not so much that she stops holding onto him tightly or enough to let the worry face from her eyes. It makes her seem older somehow, world weary. Bending her head down to rest it on his shoulder, the redhead closes her eyes. “I don’t know if we’ll have much time for camping. I’m supposed to go with a woman to see where we’re being evacuated to.”
“How long will you be at the garage? Will you be evacuated too? I — I don’t want to go if you’re not coming.” The memory of her solitude persists, he won’t be with her. Despite the fact that it’s a dream and she doesn’t feel the temperature around them, she shivers. “I don’t want to be separated at all… Can I stay with you? Until the last minute?”
“including me.” Jaiden nods after a moment. “You and I, just us, in the mustang going up to somewhere and camping. Spending time alone. roasting marshmallows, going fishing. hiking in the mornings, cuddling in front of the campfire at night.” I’m not ging anywhere that involves high spaces on that date because I don’t want to miss out on any more of your life than I already have.”
“As far as I know,before, during, and after….You can stay with me as long as you can. I want you to stay with me during, but I know you won’t.”
“I can’t…” she starts to say, he already knows the reason why. The equally tall blonde woman that might die if she’s not there. “I have to be on the boats… but I’ll stay with you until then, at your apartment instead of mine.” Maybe that’s why she’s there in the first place, because of the man in her arms. She smiles, and the relief in her eyes is evident. “You know… I talked to someone who knows that the visions are true. If they are, then you don’t have to worry about me in Vietnam, because I will be here.”
Maybe he’s the one that makes sure of that.
“maybe….maybe we can bring the blonde with us? Hide her somewhere not on the boats? Make it where she doesn’t need to be there, so you don’t need to be there?” Jaden smiles warmly. “Or I can come with you….into the boats.”
“She gets shot trying to save some children…” There’s a hopeless pitch in Delia’s voice, though she does offer a sad smile. The offer of him going with her to the boats, makes her swell and she takes a deep breath before clinging tightly to him. “We’ll figure something out… Just make sure you’re no where near a helicopter and I promise I will be fine.”
It’s not a promise that she knows she’ll be able to keep, but knowing that he’s safe and not falling through the air toward certain death will be enough to make her try.
It never is nice when children are involved. It’s a dark, dark thing to see children hurt or, god forbid, killed, but it apparently happens none too often in today’s world that, when the horror does occur, it still has the effect of a punch to the stomach, a kick to the head, and a hangover combined into one whirling sensation of horror. The wheels in his head are turning, the little punch card feeder going mad programming something into Jaiden’s head. “Then I’m with you, when this happens, for as long as I can be. If I can go with you, I will. I may not be bulletproof, but on the ground I can do a lot more than look pretty. I can stop them…I can stop them from killing kids. I can record it, show the world what’s happening. People don’t know what’s going on here. They think the Evolved are just..I don’t know…a small problem that has potential for terror. They forget we’re people, with lives and loves.”
His hand brushes her shoulder. “I just got to know you. I don’t want you to go anywhere.”
“For as long as I can help it, I won’t go anywhere.” Delia smiles up at him, reaching to his cheek with one hand to caress the side of his face. For him, the love affair has been as fast as a hurricane, for her it’s been like a long summer shower, the kind that last longer than you’d expect.
But that’s the way he designed it and the spark in her eyes as she looks up at him, even in dreams, shows that she wouldn’t change it for the world.
Leaning into the hug, the red head curls into his form the way she did the first time they met this way. And just like the first time, the moment he tightens his arms around her, she fades away from view…. but this time… he can still feel her.
There was a movie that came out a few years back that starred a woman who could turn invisible. Or Kevin Bacon. The one with superheroes and not with a murderous psychopath. this is kind of how this is now, with an invisible girl in his arms. he can almost feel her breathing in and out, he can almost feel the brush of her hair against his chest.
Is he waking up? Is he still asleep? He bends to kiss the top of the girl’s head in his arms, holding her close. “I will never let you go, Delia. In dream or in the real. You and I will be together.”
The golden sun pouring into the room hits her hair, making it glow like fire. Opening her eyes to slivers at his words, Delia smiles up at Jaiden and reaches for a soft kiss on the lips. Three gentle touches before she parts her lips for a brief impassioned one.
“It’s the end of the world as we know it…”
And Delia feels fine.