061 x 160 // video/dream/action // the plague 19th - 26th

[dignity_misery]

VIDEO/ACTION

[Carla has experience this sensation before. While languishing away in her one-true-god's domain, she had felt exactly like this. Trapped inside a fading shell, unseen by the world and increasingly unknown to herself. It had led her somewhere dreadful the last time, she had tried to fend it off with a false sense of purpose: her love for her 'master', her place as his 'art.' She still hates herself for it, still wishes she had let go of her vanity and taken sweet, bloody vengeance on the arrogant man who had pulled her back from death to play doll for him.

She can't stand it. Can't stand going unrecognized by those she depends on, going unheard and unnoticed. All she ever wanted, long before the bullet pierced her skull, was to leave marks on the world, to scratch herself into others with a pain they would remember fondly.

She hates this rotting feeling.

It does her very little good, but she has the video of her device trained on her face, is talking with a great deal of emphasis, anger and panic showing in her expression, in the way she motions with her hands and tries to grip someone's, anyone's, attention.

But there's no sound, and for some there may be no woman visible either.]

JULY 19th - DREAM - Creepy and Violent

The throng is suffocating, a pool of bodies all jumping and moving together, dancing as lights flash overhead: red and green and blue. There might be music playing, but that's hard to tell, there's so much noise from the crowd, feet stomping, lungs breathing, delighted screams and chatter. But the bass is palpable, thundering like a pulse from the corners of the room, huge with high-ceilings. A warehouse; steel rafters and sheet-metal walls ring tinny, another layer of noise and echo in an already overwhelming scene.

And there you are in the center of it all, bathed in waves of bodies, their sweat and their scent. Hands with no face to give them personality brush against you uninvited. Eyes with bodies obscured by dancing figures smile at you, flickering in and out of shadow. Mouths coated in glitter beckon. You smile, black-eyed and lithe.

They are all prey to you, and whether it's their innocence or their life that you take... you know it won't be missed. You'll take and you'll use and you'll toss them aside again, on to the next need. There's always something that you need, always a constant emptiness in the center of your being and an animal shrieking in the back of your mind that demands bones and meat. You need to drown them out, you need to satisfy yourself.

You're never satisfied, and it infuriates you.

You take it out on the crowd, one by one. They continue to dance, despite screams of delight and of pain. Despite the tears and blood.

Your hands and face are wet and your heart is racing, thumping in time to the music you are not listening to.

And slowly, your suffering heart relaxes and you think of nothing, you exhibit no control.

(I've come to burn you down.)

Comments

[video;]

[unflagging]

What's that? I didn't catch it.

[video;]

[dignity_misery]

[Fury! There may be no sound but she is cursing at him angrily.]

[video;]

[unflagging]

Oh, come on! There's no need for all that. I just couldn't hear you.

[video;]

[dignity_misery]

[She glowers at him, lips pursed.]

[video;]

[unflagging]

They say silence is golden.

From where I sit, it feels a bit...icy.

[video;]

[dignity_misery]

[She has a great deal of practice at this pissed off face. And icy is definitely the word, although she has been known to fly into heated rages from time to time. At the moment, however, she is more sullen and upset than anything else.]

[She says something clipped and snide, lip curling.

[video;]

[unflagging]

I heard that.

[He didn't, but...]

[video;]

[dignity_misery]

[She flashes him a sharp, angry, smile. Goddamn right, buddy.]

[video;]

[unflagging]

You know, you're beautiful when you're angry. I could watch this aaaaall day.

[video;]

[dignity_misery]

[She is beautiful when she's angry, and the pleasure shows on her face. It doesn't make her any less furious, she can't stand this bullshit, but she's starting to enjoying hating him. Hate was a much better emotion than boredom.]

[She looks entirely too flattered when she mouths Fuck you.]

[video;]

[unflagging]

Yes, please. I wouldn't mind it.

[He's just all smiles~]

[video;]

[dignity_misery]

[Her eyes narrow. It's not repulsion, but... if she were able to indulge her promiscuity, she wouldn't be nearly as angry. She's lacking presence however.]

[In lieu of it, she makes a hole with one hand and gently agitates it with the fingers of the other.]

July 19th - 1/2

[mortemscintilla]

[ It's a dream no uglier than his usual ones. Certainly no prettier. ]

[ But right off the bat, he knows it's not his. It dovetails between two separate sequences -- one about disemboweling a basket-full of cheerfully-smiling children with Yin's face, the other about suffocating to death inside a monstrous snatch lined with barbed-wire and thorns. Pure psych 101 stuff. Fodder to stick up the Jung pipe. But the middle dream ... isn't his. It lacks the symmetry of his dreams, in which both his memory and imagination have the same motives for playing their parts. Not so here. This is a dream from a wrong-shaped brain. Miasmic, multicolored fireworks. Salty hot-cross buns of skin. Bodies swaying, taking him with them into a conspiracy: witnesses to something beautiful and utterly hideous. ]

[ Some dreams are not fit for language. They can't survive the translation. Yet, when Hei opens his eyes, wide-awake, a name pours into his mind, the same way reality pours back when you awaken from an awful nightmare. ]

[ Carla. ]

[mortemscintilla]

[ He is far from a philanthropist. He has no reason to help Carla. Certainly no inclination. Pai's arrival hasn't softened his brains in a soup of sentimentality. The opposite. It's forced him to tighten the screws and batten down the hatches. Part of him has reverted to the mindset of Heaven's War -- where bloodshed and protecting what's most valuable cauterized you against everything except leverage, assets and an exit strategy. ]

[ Maybe that's why he does it. Debts, not threats, are the negotiatory pendulums that swing above most peoples' necks. The generosity of each favor is directly proportional to what you can offer in return. ]

[ That night, he visits the Underground. He strings up a drug-peddler on a rack -- the framework rattling and crusted in dark splotches of blood. (Hei might've chosen a different target, if the man hadn't had a 13-year-old sprawled out-cold in his bed. It's not an act of heroism. It's one more weed exterminated, so Hei breathes easier when Pai wanders the Underground alone.) Progression over conclusion. Something slow and ugly. That's what he told Carla. He didn't mean it exactly this way -- but. Oh well. ]

[ There's a set of Blackhawk XSFs he's been waiting to try out. ]

video;

[intheblanks]

[He's had the dreams, and he can't say they haven't disturbed him. It's not so much the content, its the sensation of calm washing through the carnage. And he's looked her up on the network the next day, only to find this silent message, somehow overlooked before, as if it never existed.

So he connects the video feed.]

Are you there?

video;

[dignity_misery]

[There's a little less of her than there was, each day that goes by. Today, her features are somewhat less distinct than they usually are, strong cheeks and sharp nose softened, blurring into just any other girl's face. An unhappy girl, but not one who drew the eye.]

Here I am.

[If he can hear her at all, her voice is faint and indistinct.]

video;

[intheblanks]

[He can, just. As though she's far away, voice as indistinct as her features. He watches her mouth, only a small aid in deciphering what she's saying.]

Good. I don't want you flickering out on me.

video;

[dignity_misery]

You wouldn't notice.

[It's not entirely petulance, it's also a statement of fact about what's happening to her.]

video;

[intheblanks]

No? [He raises his eyebrows, then picks up the camera, panning across his desk.] Maybe not, but I'd wonder what all the notes were about.

[There are other names too, but a prevailing theme on a particularly obnoxious shade of pink post-it is the phrase check on Carla]

video;

[dignity_misery]

[She hasn't been in to look at his desk in quite some time. It's an interesting development, although it doesn't entirely soothe her agitation. For once, it isn't personal to Chase, more an aimless anger fed by fear.]

Maybe they'll disappear too.

video;

[intheblanks]

[He just shakes his head, setting the device back down.]

You're too hard to forget. I'd be left wondering where all these conflicted feelings about how much I'd like to massacre a few dozen teenage ravers come from. Their music isn't that bad.

video;

[dignity_misery]

I like techno.

[Which considering her usual opinions on music.........]

video;

[intheblanks]

Some people find mindless noise soothing.

video;

[dignity_misery]

[Yes. She totally does. And now she's just giving him a suspicious look because she doesn't really understand why he's talking about murdering delicious teenagers.]

I didn't think teenagers were your style.

video;

[intheblanks]

[The small lift to his eyebrows indicates that there's obviously a joke to be made there, and he's sidestepping it.]

It was a dream, I didn't ID them. A very... bloody dream. [And he recognised something about you in it, Carla. Like a signature scent caught through the iron tang of the blood.]