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thejusticelounge2014-03-27 09:07 am
bossymarmalade) wrote in thejusticelounge2014-03-27 09:07 am
dream
You find yourself in an all-black building, pure obsidian walls and gentle oil lamp sconces that illuminate the room that you are in. You are among five people: Kyle Rayner, Clark Kent, Roy Harper, Mar’i Grayson, Cass Cain.
You have been fully healed.
There is an owl and a raven perched on the bower of an open doorway, and they seem to be bickering at each other and ignoring you and your group. Eventually they quiet and still when a figure steps into the room.
He is tall and long, with dark night stars for eyes and a mop of wild black hair. His skin is pale but also not quite skin. It looks more as if it is being illuminated brightly from unknown sources. He carries with him a single oil lamp.
"Welcome. You may call me Dream. First I shall assure you that everyone you care about is safe. Some have even returned home. Some of you I have met before. Hello again Clark Kent, and greetings Kyle Rayner.” He nods at them both coldly and looks back at the group. ”Allow me to explain this situation." Dream goes on to explain.
"Your path homewards is through this door, and you may each go through and speak your confession. Once you go through to the next room, you will be in the realm of the beings. We cannot protect you. If you try to fight them, they will kill you. There are some things that even you cannot try to control, no matter how much you believe you can.” Dream looks a little sad at this, and the owl and the raven both flap their wings, as if agitated.
"Speak the truth from your heart, and be well."
The Green Lantern rises into the air and flies through the doorway. He sees - well, he sees a confessional booth. Ornate and foreboding, it sits in the middle of a stark white nothingness. Really, what else did he expect? Kyle figures that everyone will see something different, somewhere individualized, to tell their secret. It makes sense. For Kyle, it’s a confessional.
Kyle steps into the booth, and sits on the bench. He doesn’t wait for any priest. He’s not looking for absolution, he just wants to go home.
"Don’t forgive me, I haven’t sinned. I mean not that it matters to any of you stupid asshole beings."
Kyle exhales roughly and holds a hand up in the air, arguing with no one except himself. “Look - I know I’m not the most logical guy and I know my thinking is like a bajillion kinds of of faulty, but. That’s the point of a confession, right? To admit something, because now you can look back and it’s like ‘yeah that was a stupid-ass thing to do’. So. This one time I watched Roy eat an expired yogurt and I didn’t tell him, I just watched him eat it and he never even realized, till later I guess.”
Kyle looks around the dark mahogany box, his hands braced on his knees.
"No? Nothing? Not good enough? Okay well how about this: being with a dude ended up really sucking and weird and wrong. And it was the wrong life choice for me and I made it for all the wrong reasons. And mom would’ve disapproved anyway, yeah - she was a bigot like that; but I still feel guilty about disappointing her. And screw the whole ‘kiss of death’ bullshit, I’m done with feeling like I’m some sorta loser who by virtue of my love ends up with a goddamn nauseating list of killed women. Maybe it’s true: I am somehow damaged en la mente y espíritu, enough to destroy lives. Maybe not. I dunno, but whatever. Maybe I’ll just keep taking that risk and getting women killed, cause maybe that’s just the way I wanna roll. Everyone dies at some point. And so will Zatanna, right? Least I can do is give her anything she asks before it all goes to hell. Whoop, there it is.”
He stands up in the box, his ring glowing and his entire body set ablaze in green fire. ”And if you think I’m just gonna sit here and—”
He tries, first for Mar’i, to make sure she’s alright, but she can’t hear him, and when he opens his jaw to shout at Cass, it’s like breathing in molasses. So he stops, and listens, and then looks down at the arm that had been—
Then, he just can’t stop staring at his arm.
His. Arm.
Not the right, but the left, and he doesn’t even attempt to move it in some sort of irrational fear that it’ll fall off—crumble like clay— and drift away. It takes him a lifetime, almost an eternity to flex his elbow, to turn it and there’s something—there’s something there— but then they are all getting shuffled from the room like the preview video before the 3D ride was over and they had to get strapped in the auditorium now, and Roy looks over at Kyle, trying to catch his eye—Roy wants him to tell him it’ll be fine, hermano, with that Kyle-confidence he has, half-balls and half-sheer dumb luck—
Clark?
And Roy wonders for a moment how it is that he got so lucky to be surrounded with this many great people who fuel the need for action within his own body. Half-balls, half-sheer dumb luck.
They lead him into a dark hallway, to a door that he falls through, and then suddenly, the desert is blooming before him like a great night-flower, sloping purple swells of dunes and the flat rise of a plateau; somewhere, a ky-oat whined plaintively and Roy looked around the space around him, the darkness of the night and the waxing moon above. Lonesome, but not lonely.
A confession? Heart-felt and never once told to anyone else? Something to get him home to his girls, his sister, his brothers? With both arms, no arms, half-a-brain but a heart full?
He can feel the balm he’d been rubbing into her legs on his fingers and smirks a little because compared to the rest of the Cachement bullshit, this was easy.
Easy.
"When I drink, I think about other guys," Roy began, looking up at the sky, eyes catching on Orion’s belt. Then, when nothing happened, he clarified: "..in a pretty fucking gay way."
—-
Roy wakes up in his bed in the Star City apartment, sunlight streaming in through the window, both arms crooked under his head.
He sits up, slowly, and strangely, nothing hurts, nothing aches, and he looks down at both his—
Both his hands.
He bellows a laugh, turning his palms up to stare at his callouses—yeah, there, no need to break his hands in again—and stops, looking down at the inked mark in his skin, his eyes softening, going glittery and damp, before Roy was outright crying at the sight of it: just like they’d taught her in the elementary school art class during ceramics week, she’d made her mark in her creation.
There, on the inside of his wrist, carved neatly into his body, Lian’s name in her own handwriting, heart for the dot over the i, was fletched into his skin.
Duk-Ga once told his daughter that he’d love her even if she never flew.
It was a silly thing to say to a child whose greatest fear was that she would never fly, that her body would be earth-bound forever, from when she came bloody from her mother’s body until they buried her deep in the cool, dark ground. But when the doors at the end of the obsidian-gilded room slid open, and the tightrope pulled taut out from where the floor suddenly disappeared off into a cool darkness, Mar’i finally realized what he was training her for.
There was a sick moment, as she instinctively moved forward, tenderly placing one pointed toe onto the rope, that Mar’i realized this might be the third charm. ’If you try to fight them, they will kill you,’ Dream said, and Mar’i knew that she would be too stupid to not fight back, to actually heed his warning. It was a warrior’s nature, and she was all warrior — all burning flesh and slicing blades and the thunderous sound of dense bones and golden feline musculature charging without thinking at an enemy.
At the last moment, as her second foot crept onto the rope, she glanced back, over her shoulder, for a last look. But the doors had already closed, and it was too late — too late for you to say goodbye now.
She moved through the darkness, one foot in front of the other, feet inside her boots tight and sharp, every step precise and calculated. At some point, she even closed her eyes and let the figure behind her slide his hands under her arms, pushing them up for greater balance. But she knew not to turn around. ”Never look behind you, 스타샤인,” Duk-Ga always said, tucking under her chin to make her raise it higher, pinching at her hipbones to make her suck in her breath. ”All that lies behind you are things that will make you fall.”
The rope was taut and Mar’i was sure and she walked further and further in the darkness. She walked until the fear of being alone in this dark, the fear she was beginning to move past, came slipping back in, like a seed blossoming after a wildfire, after—
She didn’t realize she was crying until the first tear steamed off her cheek. She hadn’t realized she was burning hot, either, every inch of her flickering in the heat pouring off her body like cement in the summer sun. Above her head, her dark locks were twisting and twirling, the ends bright purple and luminous, like the heart of a star galaxies—universes—away, burning away towards the inevitable smiling Death.
"I don’t," she began, as the end of the rope came into view. The frayed edge was anchored around the sharp point of a rock, at the entrance of backlit cave. She knew that glow. She knew that cave.
He was waiting there, just like he always did. His soft brown skin was illuminated by the Lazarus Pit bubbling before him, his black curls tossed back perfectly like a vial of India Ink spilled over his head. When he turned his head, she almost laughed. It was hard to remember when she saw the blue-eyed Damian on a daily basis that Ibn’s eyes were gold. Everything had started blurring together now, all the details between the man she loved and the boy she watched murder a Dream of hers, and the distance between stars and hearts — all these things were twisted and corrupted in her mind now, hidden behind the shards she had tried to reorganize into some semblance of stability, some jagged mirror-mask to hide her heartbreak. But she had once told him his eyes could persuade her to do anything, and perhaps that was still true.
"I’ve been avoiding you," Mar’i began with a sorrowful smile, moving forward slowly, surely. She moved one of his curls back into place, the one he scoffed at her calling a ‘cowlick,’ the one that would never stay in place no matter how much he coaxed and styled it. ”But how could I talk about you? Something goes into a star’s heart, and it doesn’t come back out. You’re never coming back. I’m never coming back to you.” Her hand dragged down from his hairline, to the sharp curve of his jawline, flawlessly and meticulously shaved and moisturized, then down the front of the green cape fastened tightly around his shoulders. ”I’ll always love you but I don’t love you anymore.”
Ibn’s hand drew out from underneath his cape, and gestured with an open palm towards the Lazarus Pit. She knew what he was offering, because he had offered it a million times and it was one of the reasons she wanted to spend an eternity with him long ago in a world that was no longer hers — because he could protect her from the death she feared so, because he could give her that eternity. Mar’i’s eyes followed his movement, out to the warm bubbling depths. An eternity, that was what he could give her.
She slowly traced her sight back, from the gurgling life-water, to the manicured nails, to his suit sleeve and the green cape, back up to his face. Her hand slowly withdrew from his cape, fingertips not lingering against the fabric, not trying to memorize something she already knew by heart. After a moment, Mar’i smiled and shook her head, taking a step back from him, separating their bodies, dissecting their gravity.
"No. I’m not scared of just a lifetime anymore. Not if I have them with me. It’ll all be fine, and I’ll love them a eternity for every second I get with them, up until the very end, if that’s how it works out. And then I’ll take Death’s hand—she’s a woman, Ibn, did you know? Well, of course you didn’t, you were always as scared as I was—and it’ll all be alright."
Duk-Ga’s hands held her arms up again for balance, and Mar’i’s eyes slipped shut.
"I didn’t go to my mother’s funeral."
When she opened her eyes again, she was alone in the HSR room, floating above the wreckage, her arm still extended towards where her world had appeared, reaching out for them. Slowly, gently, Mar’i put it down.
Cass stepped up, and faced Cain’s cell much like she had several times in the past. But it’d been a while…and she didn’t want to think about how long a while it had been.
"I’d do anything for them." she spoke quietly, her hands placed in her pockets as she looks to Cain’s back, turned to her since her arrival there, "I’d kill, I’d become what I could’ve been under you. If it means they’re safe, I’ll do it."
"That’s because they taught me what a family is, and I’m still finding out more of my family. I think I have a little brother now too. And he is…" she cut her sentence short, deciding it was best that Cain not hear about Ramsey. He was far above the kind of person Cain was.
"They taught me everything you kept away from me. They made me human." she slammed her hand up against the glass, shaking as she anticipated the guards that never came, “And that’s far more than you ever did for me.”
Cass turned about facing away from Cain as she exited the prison and made her way back into Gotham, and back to her family’s home.
You have been fully healed.
There is an owl and a raven perched on the bower of an open doorway, and they seem to be bickering at each other and ignoring you and your group. Eventually they quiet and still when a figure steps into the room.
He is tall and long, with dark night stars for eyes and a mop of wild black hair. His skin is pale but also not quite skin. It looks more as if it is being illuminated brightly from unknown sources. He carries with him a single oil lamp.
"Welcome. You may call me Dream. First I shall assure you that everyone you care about is safe. Some have even returned home. Some of you I have met before. Hello again Clark Kent, and greetings Kyle Rayner.” He nods at them both coldly and looks back at the group. ”Allow me to explain this situation." Dream goes on to explain.
"Your path homewards is through this door, and you may each go through and speak your confession. Once you go through to the next room, you will be in the realm of the beings. We cannot protect you. If you try to fight them, they will kill you. There are some things that even you cannot try to control, no matter how much you believe you can.” Dream looks a little sad at this, and the owl and the raven both flap their wings, as if agitated.
"Speak the truth from your heart, and be well."
The Green Lantern rises into the air and flies through the doorway. He sees - well, he sees a confessional booth. Ornate and foreboding, it sits in the middle of a stark white nothingness. Really, what else did he expect? Kyle figures that everyone will see something different, somewhere individualized, to tell their secret. It makes sense. For Kyle, it’s a confessional.
Kyle steps into the booth, and sits on the bench. He doesn’t wait for any priest. He’s not looking for absolution, he just wants to go home.
"Don’t forgive me, I haven’t sinned. I mean not that it matters to any of you stupid asshole beings."
Kyle exhales roughly and holds a hand up in the air, arguing with no one except himself. “Look - I know I’m not the most logical guy and I know my thinking is like a bajillion kinds of of faulty, but. That’s the point of a confession, right? To admit something, because now you can look back and it’s like ‘yeah that was a stupid-ass thing to do’. So. This one time I watched Roy eat an expired yogurt and I didn’t tell him, I just watched him eat it and he never even realized, till later I guess.”
Kyle looks around the dark mahogany box, his hands braced on his knees.
"No? Nothing? Not good enough? Okay well how about this: being with a dude ended up really sucking and weird and wrong. And it was the wrong life choice for me and I made it for all the wrong reasons. And mom would’ve disapproved anyway, yeah - she was a bigot like that; but I still feel guilty about disappointing her. And screw the whole ‘kiss of death’ bullshit, I’m done with feeling like I’m some sorta loser who by virtue of my love ends up with a goddamn nauseating list of killed women. Maybe it’s true: I am somehow damaged en la mente y espíritu, enough to destroy lives. Maybe not. I dunno, but whatever. Maybe I’ll just keep taking that risk and getting women killed, cause maybe that’s just the way I wanna roll. Everyone dies at some point. And so will Zatanna, right? Least I can do is give her anything she asks before it all goes to hell. Whoop, there it is.”
He stands up in the box, his ring glowing and his entire body set ablaze in green fire. ”And if you think I’m just gonna sit here and—”
He tries, first for Mar’i, to make sure she’s alright, but she can’t hear him, and when he opens his jaw to shout at Cass, it’s like breathing in molasses. So he stops, and listens, and then looks down at the arm that had been—
Then, he just can’t stop staring at his arm.
His. Arm.
Not the right, but the left, and he doesn’t even attempt to move it in some sort of irrational fear that it’ll fall off—crumble like clay— and drift away. It takes him a lifetime, almost an eternity to flex his elbow, to turn it and there’s something—there’s something there— but then they are all getting shuffled from the room like the preview video before the 3D ride was over and they had to get strapped in the auditorium now, and Roy looks over at Kyle, trying to catch his eye—Roy wants him to tell him it’ll be fine, hermano, with that Kyle-confidence he has, half-balls and half-sheer dumb luck—
Clark?
And Roy wonders for a moment how it is that he got so lucky to be surrounded with this many great people who fuel the need for action within his own body. Half-balls, half-sheer dumb luck.
They lead him into a dark hallway, to a door that he falls through, and then suddenly, the desert is blooming before him like a great night-flower, sloping purple swells of dunes and the flat rise of a plateau; somewhere, a ky-oat whined plaintively and Roy looked around the space around him, the darkness of the night and the waxing moon above. Lonesome, but not lonely.
A confession? Heart-felt and never once told to anyone else? Something to get him home to his girls, his sister, his brothers? With both arms, no arms, half-a-brain but a heart full?
He can feel the balm he’d been rubbing into her legs on his fingers and smirks a little because compared to the rest of the Cachement bullshit, this was easy.
Easy.
"When I drink, I think about other guys," Roy began, looking up at the sky, eyes catching on Orion’s belt. Then, when nothing happened, he clarified: "..in a pretty fucking gay way."
—-
Roy wakes up in his bed in the Star City apartment, sunlight streaming in through the window, both arms crooked under his head.
He sits up, slowly, and strangely, nothing hurts, nothing aches, and he looks down at both his—
Both his hands.
He bellows a laugh, turning his palms up to stare at his callouses—yeah, there, no need to break his hands in again—and stops, looking down at the inked mark in his skin, his eyes softening, going glittery and damp, before Roy was outright crying at the sight of it: just like they’d taught her in the elementary school art class during ceramics week, she’d made her mark in her creation.
There, on the inside of his wrist, carved neatly into his body, Lian’s name in her own handwriting, heart for the dot over the i, was fletched into his skin.
Duk-Ga once told his daughter that he’d love her even if she never flew.
It was a silly thing to say to a child whose greatest fear was that she would never fly, that her body would be earth-bound forever, from when she came bloody from her mother’s body until they buried her deep in the cool, dark ground. But when the doors at the end of the obsidian-gilded room slid open, and the tightrope pulled taut out from where the floor suddenly disappeared off into a cool darkness, Mar’i finally realized what he was training her for.
There was a sick moment, as she instinctively moved forward, tenderly placing one pointed toe onto the rope, that Mar’i realized this might be the third charm. ’If you try to fight them, they will kill you,’ Dream said, and Mar’i knew that she would be too stupid to not fight back, to actually heed his warning. It was a warrior’s nature, and she was all warrior — all burning flesh and slicing blades and the thunderous sound of dense bones and golden feline musculature charging without thinking at an enemy.
At the last moment, as her second foot crept onto the rope, she glanced back, over her shoulder, for a last look. But the doors had already closed, and it was too late — too late for you to say goodbye now.
She moved through the darkness, one foot in front of the other, feet inside her boots tight and sharp, every step precise and calculated. At some point, she even closed her eyes and let the figure behind her slide his hands under her arms, pushing them up for greater balance. But she knew not to turn around. ”Never look behind you, 스타샤인,” Duk-Ga always said, tucking under her chin to make her raise it higher, pinching at her hipbones to make her suck in her breath. ”All that lies behind you are things that will make you fall.”
The rope was taut and Mar’i was sure and she walked further and further in the darkness. She walked until the fear of being alone in this dark, the fear she was beginning to move past, came slipping back in, like a seed blossoming after a wildfire, after—
She didn’t realize she was crying until the first tear steamed off her cheek. She hadn’t realized she was burning hot, either, every inch of her flickering in the heat pouring off her body like cement in the summer sun. Above her head, her dark locks were twisting and twirling, the ends bright purple and luminous, like the heart of a star galaxies—universes—away, burning away towards the inevitable smiling Death.
"I don’t," she began, as the end of the rope came into view. The frayed edge was anchored around the sharp point of a rock, at the entrance of backlit cave. She knew that glow. She knew that cave.
He was waiting there, just like he always did. His soft brown skin was illuminated by the Lazarus Pit bubbling before him, his black curls tossed back perfectly like a vial of India Ink spilled over his head. When he turned his head, she almost laughed. It was hard to remember when she saw the blue-eyed Damian on a daily basis that Ibn’s eyes were gold. Everything had started blurring together now, all the details between the man she loved and the boy she watched murder a Dream of hers, and the distance between stars and hearts — all these things were twisted and corrupted in her mind now, hidden behind the shards she had tried to reorganize into some semblance of stability, some jagged mirror-mask to hide her heartbreak. But she had once told him his eyes could persuade her to do anything, and perhaps that was still true.
"I’ve been avoiding you," Mar’i began with a sorrowful smile, moving forward slowly, surely. She moved one of his curls back into place, the one he scoffed at her calling a ‘cowlick,’ the one that would never stay in place no matter how much he coaxed and styled it. ”But how could I talk about you? Something goes into a star’s heart, and it doesn’t come back out. You’re never coming back. I’m never coming back to you.” Her hand dragged down from his hairline, to the sharp curve of his jawline, flawlessly and meticulously shaved and moisturized, then down the front of the green cape fastened tightly around his shoulders. ”I’ll always love you but I don’t love you anymore.”
Ibn’s hand drew out from underneath his cape, and gestured with an open palm towards the Lazarus Pit. She knew what he was offering, because he had offered it a million times and it was one of the reasons she wanted to spend an eternity with him long ago in a world that was no longer hers — because he could protect her from the death she feared so, because he could give her that eternity. Mar’i’s eyes followed his movement, out to the warm bubbling depths. An eternity, that was what he could give her.
She slowly traced her sight back, from the gurgling life-water, to the manicured nails, to his suit sleeve and the green cape, back up to his face. Her hand slowly withdrew from his cape, fingertips not lingering against the fabric, not trying to memorize something she already knew by heart. After a moment, Mar’i smiled and shook her head, taking a step back from him, separating their bodies, dissecting their gravity.
"No. I’m not scared of just a lifetime anymore. Not if I have them with me. It’ll all be fine, and I’ll love them a eternity for every second I get with them, up until the very end, if that’s how it works out. And then I’ll take Death’s hand—she’s a woman, Ibn, did you know? Well, of course you didn’t, you were always as scared as I was—and it’ll all be alright."
Duk-Ga’s hands held her arms up again for balance, and Mar’i’s eyes slipped shut.
"I didn’t go to my mother’s funeral."
When she opened her eyes again, she was alone in the HSR room, floating above the wreckage, her arm still extended towards where her world had appeared, reaching out for them. Slowly, gently, Mar’i put it down.
Cass stepped up, and faced Cain’s cell much like she had several times in the past. But it’d been a while…and she didn’t want to think about how long a while it had been.
"I’d do anything for them." she spoke quietly, her hands placed in her pockets as she looks to Cain’s back, turned to her since her arrival there, "I’d kill, I’d become what I could’ve been under you. If it means they’re safe, I’ll do it."
"That’s because they taught me what a family is, and I’m still finding out more of my family. I think I have a little brother now too. And he is…" she cut her sentence short, deciding it was best that Cain not hear about Ramsey. He was far above the kind of person Cain was.
"They taught me everything you kept away from me. They made me human." she slammed her hand up against the glass, shaking as she anticipated the guards that never came, “And that’s far more than you ever did for me.”
Cass turned about facing away from Cain as she exited the prison and made her way back into Gotham, and back to her family’s home.