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| Scene Title | Sanctuary of the Heart |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Hokuto Ichihara visits Abigail Beauchamp in her dreams, and delivers to her the gift of peace of mind, while finding out the truth of her nightmares. |
| Date | July 2, 2009 |
Dreamscape
The dreams, or more appropriatly nightmares, that Hokuto is making her way into seem to perhaps be a wrong left turn on the way to alberquerque. The strong willed blonde woman who bought that southern cook book doesn't seem the type to have such a dreamscape.
One would think.
But Hokuto finds herself very much in warehouse, rusted holes in the ceiling, birds flitting from rafter to rafter in the moonlight that filters in from above. There should be plenty of shipping containers that are filled with evolveds here, but instead there's only one. The red corrugated side container with it's chain link front crackles with electricity. The details vivid from many days spent here.
There's someone inside the container, but hard to see from a blanket that's draped inside, but it's high enough that you can see bared feet with scrunched toes on the floor of the makeshift prison. The feet of a cot secured to the floor. Sink and toilet. A scratching sound, someone carving something into the metal is the only sound from within, as well as the person's breathing.
A soft report of wood on stone comes with each slowly taken foorfall, as Hokuto drifts through the industrial nightmare displayed out before her. This isn't what she expected to see, to find, but in some respects neither is she what Abby would expect to find. The click-clack of wooden sandals brush and scuff against the concrete floor on her meandering path towards the metal container, bare and pale fingertips brushing against the warehouse wall as the follows it with slow, graceful motions.
As she passes in front of the container, the dark silhouette she casts is not of a humble woman at all, but more predatory and feline that her normal self would seem. Cloth that seems to have no texture or depth, just matte black like pooled ink hangs off of parchment white skin, the traditional Japanese attire of a kimono is trimmed in white cloth, like a study of light and dark illustration brought to life.
She crouches, slowly and fluidly, revealing that same long and black hair Abby recalls from waking life, but the too-pale face is obscured, in part, by a blindfold of tattered cloth drawn over her eyes, flecked with tiny points of what resembles starlight. Peering into the container, towards the sound of breathing, it is somehow through this blindfold that the dream watches the dreamer, and tries to piece this mental puzzle together.
Abby's expecting a green eyed man, and all that comes with him. Or a man who wields red lightening and another who wields darkness. Outside of here, she's asleep on her bed, sated from Leonard's steak that he made and made her eat. Tucked in and safe in her apartment from any boogey men, gun wielding pimps or worse.
The footseps are not part of this pattern that she's come to know in her terrors and the scratching stops, bare feet disappearing from sight as the coils from the cot protest the sudden weight that they're made to endure. "Please don't. I can't heal anymore. I can't heal anymore, you've worn me out."
Dark brows furrow behind and partly above black cloth, and pale fingers move to entwine with electrocuted fencing. They pass through, like so much smoke, the pale woman's body turning in to so much water-thinned ink sparkling with motes of starlight as she slithers through the bars, reforming in wispy tendrils of ephemeral smoke. Not billowing and ashen like Kazimir, but more thin and sinuous, like black threads given life.
"Not them," her voice is almost the same, but with more of a purred lilt to it, some sort of inscrutably rough accent, "just me." The me of this equation is unusual, incongruent with the nightmares. But then, so is the slow and gradual shift of the environment around Hokuto as she raises a hand to press against the interior wall of the metal box.
"You deserve… so much better than this," she states in a hushed tone of voice, as corrugated metal slowly begins shifting into warm cream-colored paint on walls, as iron underfoot starts to bleed away to hardwood floors, and the sweet sounds of cicadas in the air replace the crackle and pop of electricity. It's a place that lies deep in Abigail Beauchamp's subconscious, one that is trying to push away the pervasive nightmare.
It is home, the home of her youth.
The blanket melts away too that hid her from Hokuto. Stringy hair, dirty jeans, worn long sleeved shirt. No blood, she came before the protagonists in her nightly production of Staten Island started up too much. But that doesn't stop the shock at the change of makeshift prison to her beloved bedroom in the woods of Louisiana. Still perched on the bed - though it's now her grass green quilt covered bed - gaunt and thin as a reed, she looks surprised, shocked. "This is not happening. Not happening, you're not here" Where before she held her breath, now she's starting to breath a little quicker.
"It isn't, and I am not." Hokuto states in level agreement, thin strings of black trailing behind her as she walks, now wood on wood in report to clear the distance from door to bed. Sometime between then and now, one of th ebedroom windows opened, letting in the fresh and crisp spring air from outside, making the sounds of those deep forest cicadas all the more prominent. Sunlight dapples the walls through coniferous branches outside, a warm and lazy morning.
"But you are, and you deserve better." One dark brow lifts slowly, and Hokuto is left to wander past shelves and a small table, turning finally towards the bed with her unseeing stare. "But I am listening, even if I am not here." Hokuto folds her arms within the wide sleeves of her kimono, narrowing her contrasting silhouette. "You called me here, called out to me, in your pain. This should not be what is in your thoughts, and heart…"
"I didn't call anyone." She doesn't remember calling anyone. God yes, She always screams for him in this nightmare. Abby's floundering, mentally, physically within the dream. She's used to the routine that always comes. The box, alone, then comes one of the three, always one of the three. THe open windows and the breeze disrupting the opaque curtains pulls her off the bed and towards the window. If anything, this might be worse. Home. Place she hasn't been since she left it. It tugs at the heart even as her hand grip the windowsill and look out. "I didn't call for you, I never call for anyone but Teo, Flint, Magnes.. God" This isn't making sense. Did Al drop something in her tea?
"Not by name," Hokuto corrects, "never by name." Her tone of voice, there, seems almost sad, disappointed. "You didn't call for me with words," the black-clad woman states, slinking her way from table to bet, black lacquered wooden sandals scuffing on the floor until her pace arrests, and she leans down, settling herself at the foot of the bed, offering out a pale hand that is withdrawn from a long and dark sleeve.
Shrouded eyes stare through the black fabric towards Abigail as the hand is offered out to her. "You want peace, not the repetition of pain. You want release, and freedom, but more importantly… you want understanding." Her head tilts to the side, sending dark locks brushing against her pale cheek. "I can afford you these things… show you what your heart wants, and what your head refuses."
"I want to dream without seeing his eyes. Any of their eyes" Abigail tears her gaze away from the window and the woods out beyond it's square, the tall grass that should be mow'd the river that lays somewhere beyond that she knows is there.
"Bookseller" It took her a moment. Faces to names is easy, names and faces to voices a little tougher. "You look like the Bookseller out in Roosevelt Island"
The hand is eye'd suspiciously. Touching people never turns out good in her dreams, it's written on her face. Afraid it's some trick of her mind.
Hokuto's lips form into a faint smile at the association. "That's part of me," she says in a hushed tone of voice, spreading her fingers just a bit more in the offer. "You can trust, again, Abigail. You can learn to trust, to touch, and the believe… but it has to start somewhere." But the hand doesn't move, Hokuto doesn't send her hand to move towards Abby's, instead it just waits there, palm up and unmoving. Something like this — whatever it is — can't be forced. A contract of this sort is something that must come willingly, even if not entirely knowingly.
"I'm afraid to" She confesses in a quiet voice, eyes downcast to palm. But she's been letting her fear rule her so far in her dreams while slowly trying to conquer it outside. "Lord, I'm so afraid" But equally pale hand closes on the other woman's, hoping, praying that it's solid and she doesn't go through it. "He comes for my tongue. You came before he could, he always comes for my tongue"
Dark brows crease together, and Hokuto's forefingers and thumb roll together slowly. The look on her face, momentary revulsion and horror, comes with a slowly drawn breath slithering in through her nostrils. "He cannot find you here, not in this house, not ever. This," she gestures with the offered hand, "is sanctuary from the nightmares. But there is someone else, someone you need to be able to invite in to the sanctuary, and that is who we are going to see, if you will learn to trust again."
"You showed me what true strength is, Abigail," the hand is offered out again, "but to feel this pit inside of you, has made me realize that even a woman as strong as yourself, occasionally needs someone to lean on. Take my hand, and let me show you that someone… let me show you what your heart feels, and your head cannot see."
"I have to be strong. If i'm not, others can't be" So she convinces herself. Always. But the hand is taken, clutched even, sinking her fingers between the other womans. Her home is sanctuary. No ones every visited it in the real world, and in this world, whatever it is… "This is what you do?" Ever the questioner about abilities. Even in here. Abigail swallows harshly, lifting herself up from her bed, bare feet sinking into the cool worn wood, toes digging in to find purchase.
She's warmer than she looks, and pale fingers curl around Abby's hand as Hokuto too rises up from the corner of the bed she was seated on. Her head dips down, slowly, into a nod as her lips upturn into a smile. "This is what I do, yes." There's no middle ground about it, perhaps it implies that the bookstore isn't anything important, and that this is, or perhaps this part of Hokuto is all that does this. It's a complex, yet simply given answer.
"Everyone has strength, but some times we must admit that there are others who can give strength to us, if we are willing to risk." With the hand taken, the sanctuary itself seems to grow hazy, the bedroom melting and fading away in to white fog speckled with pinpoints of blue-black, like an inverse night's sky canvas. When the scene blurs back in to focus though, it's in the middle of an urban environment, tall skyscrapers and passing busses, honking horns and busy people flooding the streets.
"Your mind is your own, no matter how fearful the dark corners of it may be, no matter how grim the past that leans on you might seem." Hokuto begins to walk, standing out like a sore thumb amidst the contemporary styles and clothings, a woman in stark blacks and whites and voluminous cloth decked with motes of starlight, and yet no one seems to see her, or the younger blonde the leads by the hand towards bus stop benches.
"In your heart, there is a strength of trust I can feel. A strength in the divide of your waking and sleeping days that is the unification." As she rounds the back of the bench, a man in a dark gray suit sits with his shoulders hunched, head down. Even from behind, Abby recognizes Flint.
"Love," Hokuto states in a hushed tone of voice, turning her blindfolded stare towards Abby, "is the greatest strength of all. He," she motions with her free hand towards Flint, "he is your heart. Inside of you," her hand moves to rest at the center of Abby's chest, as if to feel her heartbeat, "you have made a place for him. When you know fear again, here" she motions around the city dreamscape, "think of your sanctuary, and think of him. Nothing will be able to hurt you."
It's different from the grass, and the insects that made up the country serenade day after day. That you don't hear in the city. The cars are the insects and honking horns, the sirens the owls in the evening. And there's Flint. Scruffy flint with his usually unkempt hair and his suit that looks in need of dry cleaning. Those shoulders that never seem to straighten unless he's mad at her and trying to impart some sort of knowledge into her thick skull.
Of it's own accord, the first smile in her dreams, in deed the first one in a long time in her dreams, comes to life on her face albeit small. "He has terrors like me. he's done bad things, probably more than I even know he's done, but.. he still tries to save me. Still sticks his neck out for me when he has every right to turn away and leave me to the trouble that I find myself in"
Abigail stands there, her hand in Hokuto's held tight, letting the city pass her by. "I don't deserve him. He's the one. He's the one that has the gift I had, that got taken away. He won't give up trying to give it back to me. I have" There's some small shame in saying it, but she can say it in here. No one can hear her. "I'm not supposed to get it back. But he won't give up"
One black brow rises higher than the other above the blindfold Hokuto wears. She watches this figure, finds him defined to her by Abigal's emotions and description, finds the strange man in the back of Abby's heart given shape and form and texture in the way she describes him. Now, of course, she can find him. "Love isn't about being deserved," Hokuto's voice has a faintly biting edge to it, but it softens as she gives Abigail's hand a squeeze, "love is about acceptance. You know in your heart, that you accept him, for all his fault, for all the things he is to you." The things Hokuto is only now tangentally aware of. "He is as much your strength as you are his…" her focus turns from the back of Flint Deckard to the front of Abigail beauchamp, "and if you let him in, none of the nightmares can find you behind your combined strength."
Something in Hokuto's expression is heavy with uncertainty, or perhaps tension, it plays at the corners of her mouth and the tightness of her throat. "The demons you keep in your heart, are only able to torment you if you let them. Stop tormenting yourself, Abigail, and start looking for what you have in life that is worth having."
When she turns to look back at Flint's frame seated on the park bench, her tone becomes more wistful. "Don't let the dreams in your life slip through your fingers, or all you will have left are the nightmares."
"He lost this eye, looking for me. Logan, he took it. All he was doing was looking for me, looking through the walls, the floors. I bring him nothing but trouble. He gets hurt because of me. I don't want him to get hurt" Away from him she looks, to match Hokuto's half hidden face. "He hurt himself to save me last night. If I hadn't been with him, he wouldn't have gotten shot. He wouldn't have had to hurt me to save me" She almost tells her that it's hard. It's hard to let go of what happened on the island, hard to let go of the green eyes that swim murkily always in the distance, in the background of her nightmares and the giddy feelings that it brings.
Something about a man losing an eye for a lover strikes a note with Hokuto, causes her to look down to the ground, and then back up to Abby again. That hand that once felt the rythm of Abby's heart movs up, pale fingers cupping her cheek and turning her focus up to the taller, blindfolded woman. Hokuto wasn't quite this tall at the bookstore, it's odd, ot makes Abby feel almost like a child again, looking up to everyone.
"His choice." The words are firmly delivered, to emphasize her point, "he wants to protect you, because he cares. You are not the one to blame for this, the ones who hurt you are. Do not shut him out of your life, for the sake of protecting him…" her head shakes from side to side in slow procession, "because that would hurt you more than any of these nightmare men can."
But as her fingers trail down Abby's cheek, to her neck, Hokuto's tone changes to something more icy, something cold and predatory. "What is the name of the man with the green eyes, who haunts you?" Those black brows furrow together, and the city seems to have stopped, as if the sands of time simply ran out, and everything is not trapped at that moment she spoke. "Tell me who he is."
"John Logan" Stringy hair in real need of a proper shampooing frames her face as she looks up, blue eyes rimmed red, dry lips. "He's gone. Somewhere." She could conjure him up likely, if she wanted so that Hokuto could see him. She does that, closing her eyes, the pale barrier between the black and white garbed woman and Abby's blue eyes. Make him appear somewhere near them, dredged up from her memory. "He took me. He and another. Kept me for a long time so that I could heal people for them. I always thought it would be the government that would have taken me. I never thought it would be men with a monkey who smiled at me in the bar while I served them"
She's not gonna open her eyes and look, she doesn't want to see him but somehow it seems important to show Hokuto. Her free hand snakes out to reach out and land on the suit wearing shoulder, fingers digging in and holding tight to Flint's shoulder.
It's the warehouse again.
The same nightmarish landscape left earlier, the same dingy walls and stink of sweat and sorrow that clings to metal and wood alike. The silhouette Hokuto is presented with it more than she needs, that lanky and cocksure posture, the way his shadows mutedly blend in to the rust colored walls, while lime green irises pulse and throb like an irregular heart beat. Even through the blindfold, she can feel the fear he represents in this nightmarish avatar, holding a switchblade that gleams cruelly bright in one hand.
But before Abigail can open her eyes and see this nightmare made flesh, it's not automobiles or the sickly scnt of Logan's cigarettes that accost her senses, but rather the sweet sound of birds and bugs, and the warm breeze wafting in through her bedroom window again. It's only the two of them, only Abby and Hokuto's dreaming form, one hand still held in another. "It's safe to open your eyes… there's nothing to be afraid of here."
She's sick to her stomach just from the smell alone. The sound of him breathing, of the blade in his hand. Another harsh swallow and eyes cinched tightly shut, resisting the urge to look, to see how close she'd put him. She doesn't need to look to know his eyes are glowing and that Hokuto was touching her neck. Like he did all the time. But there's the house in Lousianna. A few hours drive from New Orleans. She knows that outside the window will be blue shutters and white planks that provide the house it's siding.
"I hate him" It's spoken with such venom. "I hate him so much I wish he would die. I wish i'd killed him. I want so badly to let Jessica find him, let Felix find him, just hold his head underwater and drown him. It's wrong of me to want it, to feel that need, I can feel my hands around his neck. I hate him so much"
Fingers move to Abigail's lips this time, pressing two there with a soft "shhhh" exhaled from parted gray lips. "Everything in its time or in its place, your desire is clear…" Hokuto's head tilts imperceptibly to the side, looking in the direction of the bedroom door, then back to Abigail again. "Don't let something like hate consume you, or you won't have room for anything else. Life, love, the things we never find time to are so easily pushed aside for something as simple as psychotic rage."
Her hand turns, palm brushing over Abigail's cheek gently before her hand finally unwinds from the younger woman's. "This is your sanctuary, and nothing can hurt you here." She reaffirms the belief, the suggestion. "But my time here, at this place, I've fulfilled what you wanted, what you needed. What you called out to me for." It wasn't for safety, for santuary, or for advice on affairs of the heart. No, what Abigail called Hokuto here for, was John Logan.
"Besides, where one dream ends, another one is intersecting." There's a knock at her bedroom door, three sharp raps, and Hokuto raises one brow again, lips curling into a smile as she looks down through dark cloth to the blonde.
"Only you can let Flint in."
"That's not my flint, the real flint" She points out. Ever practical Abby, even here. She turns towards the door with it's poster on the back of a precious moments chubby cheeked kid praying. It's a flint on the other side of the door. The one she occasionally glimpses when he lets his guard down. "If Logan comes again, if the eyes come, the smoke or the red lightening.. I just think of here, think of him?"
There's this delightfully amused laughter that comes from Hokuto as she leans in, pressing a kiss to the top of Abigail's head before rising back up, a hand on either side of her cheek, thumbs brushing just beneath the blonds eyes for a moment. "Whenever in doubt, you can always find this place inside of you. Strength and heart is here, and you can always come back home… that is the most important thing to remember. It is never too late to go back home."
But what of her laughter? That is only answered as she leans back and away from Abby, arms folding within her sleeves on a backpedaling trip towards the window. "Dreams are curious things, Abigail. Perhaps you ask Flint tomorrow, what he dreamt of tonight…" she rests one hand on the window frame, "he will say he dreamt of knocking on a door he did not recognize, that never opened." Lips purse into a mischevious and Cheshire smile, as Hokuto turns to so much black threads of night and motes of starlight, eventually leaving nothing but the warm breeze, sunlight and curtains of Abigail's bedroom, her sanctuary, her home.
And knocking.
"Only you can let Flint in."