agogelogs | say nighty-night and kiss me,

Entry tags:

say nighty-night and kiss me,

WHO? midnighter

thingpuncher & YOU.
WHAT? Fucked up dreams with a fucked up guy.
WHEN? Dec 12-23
ANYTHING ELSE? Warnings for mentions of experimentation on children, kidnapping of children, surgical horror, and things surrounding that... stuff.

Midnighter doesn't sleep much. He doesn't need to. About two weeks out of every month does him fine, and he usually catches it in short bursts, an hour here or there. He doesn't get tired. Yet, a quick half-hour nap turns into a longer night's sleep. The temperature rises in his room, in the spot he sequestered in the library, in a hallway he was passing through, and it becomes impossible to escape the need for sleep. He knows it's bad, he dreads it, but he can't fight it in time. His dreams turn strange, awkward, upsetting.

a. SONGS FOR CHILDREN.

The halls of the alien spaceship are dingy and rusted. Everything is bleak and poorly constructed, dimly lit and broken. A departure from BASE, it seems rather derelict, and painfully empty. Barely any sound echoes through its long, empty corridors, beyond the muffled hum of far off engines.

It stays like that a long time.

Finally, a nose, an ecstacy of fumbling, and one of the rusted wall panels rips itself from the inside. A teenager stumbles out, breathing harshly. He's deeply battered, one sclera filled with blood, the other eye puffy and purple. Bruises run all along what can be seen of his body, followed often by stitch marks signifying some recent surgical procedure.

He looks up at you for a long time without saying anything, his brows knit with concentration. Finally, weakly, "we can escape together."

b1. SAVE THE DAY.

There's something terrible happening in downtown San Francisco. Or maybe it's Oakland. Or Baltimore. Opal City, or Brooklyn. Somehow, it's all these cities, and none of them.

The unmistakable thing is skyscraper-sized beast making its way through the streets, crushing cars and toppling buildings without apparent effort. Covered in scales, eyes glowing red, it's some sort of larger-than-life dinosaur, and bullets bounce right off its skin.

From your vantage on a rooftop, you can see its path of destruction, and how it's clearly heading for you. Luckily, there's a man next to you, and even if he's wearing a rather strange outfit, he doesn't seem at all alarmed. If anything, he seems excited.

"You stay put, okay?" He stands, and in his right hand he's holding... a crowbar. He's going to fight the monster with a crowbar. "I've got this."

b2. SAVE THE AFTERNOON.

It's a normal day in an American city-- somewhere sunny by the harbor. The landmarks are mismatched, yes, but it's clearly America, clearly summer, clearly tourist season. People walk by happily, dating or taking out children, hanging out with friends or watching street performers. Local businesses sell their wares, and you can faintly smell popcorn...

Until a flash of electricity blinds everyone. A crash, and a group of men and women holding futuristic weapons stands in the middle of this idyllic scene, ski masks pulled over their faces to hide their identity. "Everybody stop!" One of them, a woman who has obviously positioned herself as the leader, shouts, "Not that you could move if you tried! You're all caught in the blast radius of our psycho-kinetic scatter guns! The local government has four hours to pay a ransom before we-"

"Shut up." They're not the only ones in a mask. A man, dressed a little out of place with the scenery, walks toward them. "That's not going to happen. I know how this fight ends. I've already played this fight out in my head a hundred times. It ends with me washing bits of you off me and your hostages going home happy. That is, if you don't surrender. You have ten seconds."

The leader shoots her gun at the masked man. He dodges so quickly it doesn't look like he moved.

He's smiling. "Eight..."

c. SONGS FOR MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE.

This... isn't going well.

It's all men's speed dating in a normal looking, if rather large, cafe. Everyone is wearing black. Midnighter is wearing white. Why didn't he get the memo? Was there a memo? Or maybe everyone just knew, don't wear white to speed dating, wear black, maybe that's just something every normal person knows? Does wearing white mean something? Has is he given off the wrong signals, here? The last few people he talked to certainly seemed... uninterested. Well, no, he held their interest, it was just in a 'oh god, this freak, get me away from him' sort of way.

So, normal.

There is a sense of anxiety, of not fitting in, that permeates this dream.

The little clock dings, and you're the next person to be shuffled over to Midnighter's table. Dressed in white, wearing shaded sunglasses, he's... as he normally is. Though his discomfort bleeds into the landscape of the dream, he himself seems calmly detached, collected.

At least, you know, visually.

"You can call me M."

d. LOST & FOUND.

Or maybe you're not asleep when Midnighter is. Maybe you're lucky enough to stay out of his dreams. Maybe you just find him slumped over in a hallway, or in one of the library chairs, sleeping and quietly twitching. Every once and a while, he whispers a word or two, usually something like, "stop," or, "Andrew."

It might be a good idea to wake him up. Or, you know, try.

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"O... okay."

She only knows one kind of escape. It isn't as hopeful as he says, right then. But what option does she have right then? hands wrapped around opposing elbow. Shivering the ship, she looks sorely out of place and mostly miserable. "Which is the fastest way out?"

Some part of her knows it's off, her dreams are always empty things, like much of her life, her brain can't supplement sensations it no longers remember clearly. So it can't be hers, even this whole place looks like the back end of an Atlas base.

She looks perfectly in place. The plates on her head, the sickly pallor-- so there aren't any stitch marks, but she's been worked on. He didn't know anyone else had been made, transformed, destroyed and reconstituted as he had.

Maybe, for him, the metal plates are next.

"I don't know," he all he says, and motions for her to follow him as he crawls out of the tunnel he crouched in. He crosses the hall and begins to rip apart some of the wall paneling with hysterical strength; the rusty metal twists in his hands, protesting, but ultimately complying. "But I'm gonna find out."

She wastes no time following him. Scrambling along after him when he rips the panel off the wall ( holy shit - what is he? Brick? ) - ignoring the thumping lump in her throat, the quickening heartbeat. "If you can get me to a machine... I can probably help."

Whatever this place is, whatever is going on with it, she's still her - right? Right. Or at least enough her to try.

"A machine?"

He turns back to the girl, and considers the proposal. There's... an idea, one that the computer already hates, but he doesn't care. He reaches out, taking her hand and bringing it to his temple.

"Can you make me strong enough to get out of here?"

He's tried before. It always ends in failure, always, always.

Edited (blehhh) 2017-12-23 23:26 (UTC)

Her breath comes short when he touches her - not for what he's done, but it never stops being something that happens now, and it's terrifying. That touch. To be touched, to reach and be reached for and she nods, very slowly, her fingers tremours of the earthquake that sits under her skin.

Wetting her lips, she's careful. "If you're sure, it'll mean my... mind is inside of your... your systems. You don't have too."

There couldn't be something more personal than that.

"I don't care." In the years to come, he'll care very much about his own privacy, but now? What does privacy mean when they cut you open whenever they please, strip you of your dignity, insert new muscle and bone and tissue at their whim? He presses her hands harder to his temple. "Make me stronger. I'll get us both out. I promise."

"Okay... okay..."

She's never done something like this. Into someone's cybernetics. That strange half-world that is between her body and her markings. Carefully, either to assure him or herself about what was happening, her fingers smooth against his hair. Taking long, low breaths.

"Hold onto me. Until I tell you to let go. I am not sure if it will hurt or not..."

But as her eyes close she leans in, her breath becomes even, deep and the light pulses under her skin to a steady rise. Sun between the cracks. The press of her abilities that are at once a brush and a shove. Looking, searching for where she can latch her mind like a fulcrum as a ball of light builds in her hand, pressed against his skin by his temple. Cool and hot, all at once. Clean and chemical. "... don't fight me, I've got you. I'm looking after you."

When her eyes open, they glow too. "Ready? This might... tickle."

All through this, his hands are on hers, and his expression is one of raw determination. Fear is gone. There's a chance they can get out of here. He'll take it. He doesn't give a shit about logic or safety or second chances. He wants to go.

"I was awake," he says, because maybe it'll put her at ease, "when they put the computer in my head. When they- cut into my skull. You can't hurt me." Nothing can hurt him anymore.

Her eyes fix, clear in the light. It seizes up, full and angry and she doesn't know that maybe. Jack ad always made sure she was under when they put the plates in, put the ports into her spine. Cut her open to make sure he'd have the most powerful siren.

"We're going to kill them." It peaks, maybe she is just as bad as Jack. That rage is a visceral thing in her tongue, and she lets it fill his. "All of them. They won't ever touch you again. I'll make sure."

And it breaks, waves against a cliff, she shudders into his systems in a blaze of light. Pouring herself into every nook and cranny. Crackling as her body shifts, the air shimmers in a sickly purple light. A twist where it swirls between this place, the space beyond space that stares back in the corners of this boxed in the ventilation shaft. Her body isn't a big thing, all bones and soft skin, where no one, nothing, touches her, but right now it's full. Full enough to take up all of him, as it pours out and out and out.

And when she shifts, the intimacy of the connection prompts him to move as she feels her way through his body, just as she said - tickling, she remembered the first CL4P-TP had said - from where the systems were curled up in his limbs, his mind. Searching, look, and she feels his mind pressing against hers where it weaves into cybernetics, his mind where it pulses and shudders, and lines herself to his thoughts as she keeps search, and in that moment, she knows him, she knows all of him. His wants and hates, his desires and loathings. Her head tilts up, her mouth parted in a shuddering sigh. Holding the taste of it inside her throat. Another person. Right now, all her own, selfishly she takes as selfishly she had been denied. Possessively, her mind swallows it whole, taking it all into herself like it always was hers.

"Found you."

A flood, then, of pushing hard against those limits as she beats and beats like waves, still, like these fists could have his strength and she pushes once and hard against his mind again, all of herself at once it clicks. A powerful she allows to his limbs. It could destroy him but - she knows - it'll be worth it. It will always be worth that self-destruction.

Then she snaps, without the eridium to sustain her, her body crumbles out from underneath her, sagging immediately into him.

The person she'll find is a black hole. He doesn't know his name. He doesn't know his age or how long he's been here. He only remembers the pattern, the terrible rhythm of his life: wake up in a cell, be pulled off to the operating table until the pain makes him pass out, and wake up in a cell again. Sometimes he looses days, maybe months. It's impossible to guess with any accuracy. Everything is a blur. Who is he? Who was he? He knows he's from Earth, and that he speaks English, and that America is a place he's been, but the rest of it?

They wrote MIDNIGHTER outside his cell. Why?

It's all darkness, and then she's there, filling it with light. Pain, too, but it's so minor it barely registers. He is, for a moment, her fucking puppet. Fine. Better hers than theirs. At least he chose this.

He catches her with too-fast reflexes, looks down at the crumpled girl in his arms and feels something like sorrow. Is this his fault? "I'm sorry." And then, more quietly, because he thinks he hears something coming- "what did you do?"

The light dies on her skin, but her gaze when it opens against isn't any less sharp. Direct. She might be in pain, she might be weak - but like him, it's minor to what has to be done. "You have no limitations. I removed what they have in place." She stays weak in his arms, held there, breathing unevenly - fast, slow, fast, fast, slow. An irregular heartbeat. Whatever strength she has, goes into being as little of a burden as she can be. Pushing herself up a little bit to speak clearer.

She knows what she needs to fix it.

Thank God she'll never see it again, here.

"But... if you try to pull too hard, you might rip your muscles. Be careful how you use it." She isn't under illusions. It will take a minute to get her strength back - and to do what he needs to do, he's going to have to leave her there. Good, he should have his freedom. It's not like bodies were ever anything other than shells.

"Thank you." He reaches out to-- hug her. He's seen hugs before. He knows what they're like, even if he can't remember why, or even when he's seen them. But it's a good thing to do, he thinks. "I won't let you down."

And then he's crawling through the vents, leaving her to fight off the aliens that have been keeping them captive.

(And somewhere, Midnighter awakens startled, his hands reaching for his temples-- but as always, he's alone in his own mind.)

(Thank fuck.)

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