faderift | open | brain heat meme

Entry tags:

open | brain heat meme

WHO: Anyone
WHAT: Nightmares, slumber parties, etc.
WHEN: Throughout Justinian
WHERE: Kirkwall and surrounding areas
NOTES: Ignore the first prompt if you're bothered by bugs. Also, while this is primarily to help people RP about their nightmares, feel free to use it for any kind of RP you want. (I.e., you have permission to set up a truth or dare game at the slumber party.) Talk about dreams OOC over here

This month, our heroes' sleep is getting more and more troubled. Here are some excuses to write about it.

I. SLUMBER PARTY: Mid-month, an infestation of hardy, prolific Antivan fleas requires everyone to avoid spending prolonged periods of time in their bedrooms while local alchemist Lloyd Meyers eradicates the bugs with his proprietary smoke bombs (and an equally proprietary flea bath for the Gallows' many pets). While the rooms air out for two or three nights post-treatment, bed rolls are available on the floor of the unstaffed dining hall. Sleeping outside in the courtyards is also an option, but a sudden squall of a thunderstorm will drive people inside on the second night.

Footnote: Characters who live in the city are welcome to join this slumber party anyway. Maybe they miss the ferry ashore, maybe they're afraid of tracking fleas into their own homes, maybe they already did track fleas into their homes and Lloyd is treating them too, etc.

II. ROOM SHARE: Does the thought of sleeping in the dining hall with all of your coworkers make you break out in hives? Have you missed the ferry on any other evening of the month? Lowtown has inns, and Riftwatch has a docks-side warehouse with a few side rooms outfitted as bedrooms. But there are only so many rooms available, so you might wind up sharing a room (or a bed) with a friend or whoever is nearby and desperate.

III. CAT NAP: A lack of sleep—whether it be from the nightmares, the workload, routine insomnia, or staying up too late playing Truth or Dare during the Antivan Flea Incident—might make a cat nap on a desk, in a reading nook, or over breakfast particularly appealing. And bad dreams don't need more than a few minutes to get rolling.

IV. CAMP OUT: Investigating reports of enemy scouts in the mountains, traveling along the roads to a neighboring city-state on a diplomatic errand, looking into reports of weird magic on the Wounded Coast, or heading north to provide some assistance to the war effort? All might require pitching a tent and bunking down for the night with your colleague, whether you like them or loathe them.

V. NORMAL NIGHT: If you’re already sharing a room or bed with someone, you don't need this post. But you can still use it for your nightmare threads.

VI. BETTER IDEA: Do whatever you want. Live your dreams.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I. SLUMBER PARTY

[ Yseult has no desire to participate in a slumber party. But she returns late to the Gallows, the last ferry is already gone by the time she's learned of the flea situation, and a cursory search finds her rooms being smoked and her preferred alternative sleeping locations already occupied. And, most importantly, Darras has already set up in the makeshift dining hall barracks.

So when she starts awake in the middle of the night for the third time and carefully extricates herself from beside him, it's to the kitchen at the back of the dining hall she goes. She lights a candle and then a stove, searching through the cabinets for tea with the quiet efficiency of a thief. Once she's found a packet of leaves and has a pot of water on the burner, she takes a seat at the long work table, head slumped into hands, and waits. ]

III. CAT NAP

[ On the other hand, Yseult has always been a cat napper. She just doesn't usually get caught at it, rarely napping outside her suite and adept at sensing approach just in time to look awake. She's failing at it now, which should probably be a harbinger of the sleep deprivation apocalypse. Whether it's in a quiet corner of the library, at her desk at the front of the Scouting workroom, tipped back in her chair in the dining hall between meal times, or beneath a tree in the Gallows garden with a report in her hand, she's a few seconds slower to wake than usual, just long enough to get spotted as she jerks awake and rapidly transforms expression and posture to appear like she's been alert and hard at work all along. ]

VI. WILDCARD

Hit me.

"Enough for a second cup?" comes a voice out of the dark.

John has grown very nimble on his crutch, maneuvering quietly even by the meager light cast by the candle.

No, he cannot sleep either. He has left Flint to uneasy sleep in the dining hall, avoided the temptation to put his crutch down on any of their snoring compatriots, all to walk himself into the kitchen in hopes of perhaps the same thing Yseult has already secured.

Not that John has ever been much for tea. But these are desperate times, after all.

"Should be."

Yseult's not taken by surprise, but she still takes a moment to lever herself back upright on the bench. Both hands smooth back hair toward her braid, but she makes no attempt to straighten the rumple of slept-in clothes. It'd be futile anyway.

"Plenty of tea. And I probably filled the pot."

Is it possible to take Yseult by surprise? Probably not, or it probably requires elaborate orchestration.

Similarly rumpled, John eases onto the low stool aside the bench. Stretches his leg out. His coat is missing. The laces at his throat loosened. It's very late.

"Am I imposing?"

Beyond the obvious. They are all very much in each other's space at the moment.

She answers with a little shake of her head. The hair she'd tucked behind an ear falls forward again, now clearly a larger section come loose from its hold. She sighs, and begins unpicking her braid, fingers just a little slower and more deliberate than normal. It's very early, too.

"Not enjoying the return to group quarters? I'm sure we could find a hammock."

"I don't think it would surprise you to hear that I was well out of hammocks by the time we sailed into Kirkwall harbor."

Not that it was impossible to navigate in and out of a hammock, just lacking in dignity. And too likely to remind everyone of what he was lacking, how it weakened him.

It's all a calculation he's sure Yseult can make, so John doesn't linger over it.

"I wasn't expecting to see you joining them. We've more options now than we did the last time we were all more or less trapped together."

It's certainly a calculation she can make. She didn't before she said it, and there's a little tip of her head that seems to acknowledge that mistake when John points it out. That's as near an apology as he's going to get, and she transitions it smoothly into a shrug at his surprise.

"Hunting down clean bedding and a spare room didn't seem worth the effort. At least there're no monkeys here."

"Don't invite trouble."

What are the chances someone meanders into Kirkwall and comes back tomorrow with a passel of monkeys? No one can say they have assembled a group with the best judgement in Thedas.

"If I were being polite, I'd ask if you'd like to talk about what's keeping you awake."

An offer someone else might appreciate, but surely not Yseult.

"But I suspect you'd rather not, so we might take bets on who might join us next. Or which of the mabari are to blame for our current predicament."

"What odds would you lay on Flint being next?" Yseult asks, rising as the teapot on the stove behind her begins to hiss. She prepare a second cup of tea after the first that's already laid out and sets it in front of John before slipping back into the bench.

"We'll have to set Research to investigating the cause of all this."

"A job for the Provost, who is no doubt still awake and hard at work."

On something. Is it related to what's happening right this moment? Perhaps not.

Regardless, it puts Tony out of the running as to who might push through the doorway next.

"Fair odds, for Flint," John says, after a nod of gratitude. There's enough light to see the movement, enough to cast some light onto their faces, but not enough to illuminate every flicker of expression. This hardly feels like a disadvantage, considering Yseult's control over her own reactions. "I think the Ambassador has other venues he might pursue before he considers the kitchen."

And other conversational partners he'd likely prefer over either of them, or anyone else in Riftwatch. Does that need to be pointed out?

[The library has plenty of quiet corners, and Mobius is perfectly fine with people using it as a napping refuge for it so long as nothing gets set on fire and no one is screaming bloody murder about it. He does it enough that he's hardly in a position to tell off anyone for it.

So he's just as fine with Yseult doing the same, only as he approaches--to file some books away in the general area--she's already coming to like she's heard him coming and seems to quickly enough rearrange herself like she definitely wasn't out like a light. He chuckles to himself, getting out a ladder to arrange just where he needs it.]

Maker forbid I tell anyone someone shut their eyes for a minute.

[ The way Yseult looks up at an angle from the book in front of her, brows shallowly furrowed, so perfectly imitates the mild annoyance and confusion of having been interrupted despite obviously working, some might second-guess whether they really saw her asleep at all.

But he did, and after a moment she abruptly drops the expression and shrugs one shoulder, flips a page. ]

They might not believe you.

Oh yeah? [He is Immune to looks like that, or thinks he is. Can't hide the truth of what he saw, ma'am. He wrangles a couple tomes up the ladder to slide into place.] Is that because you're not the type to get caught napping, or because no one would believe you actually sleep?

Yseult is an expert at extricating herself: from binds, from traps, from cells, from uncomfortable conversations, from situations not to her liking. A shared bed is nothing to her. Darras has slept beside her—consistently, inconsistently—for years and is used to waking up to find her disappeared, out for a walk or sitting by the fire with a book or out working in the garden in the moonlight. Sometimes she comes back to bed quickly, before he even wakes up. Sometimes he gets up to find her. Sometimes he goes back to sleep, wakes up when she slips beneath the blankets again.

Tonight, she stays away. So eventually Darras — half awake, waiting for her — decides to stop waiting.

“Want to be alone?”

She’ll have known it was him approaching just by his footsteps. Darras announces himself anyways before he puts a hand on the back of her neck, gentle, and gives a little squeeze.

She does recognize the familiar pattern of his gait, the soft scuff of bare feet on stone, and so rather than jolting upright as she might've under other scrutiny she only slowly straightens, leaning back into the weight of his hand. She reaches back to set her own over it, the shake of her head too narrow to shake him loose.

"Sit," she suggests, "Water should boil soon." She gestures vaguely behind her toward the tea kettle on the stove, the loose flap of her wrist more evidence of sleepiness, even before she tips her head onto his shoulder. "I'm too awake to sleep, but not awake enough to work." Nightmares within nightmares.

"Awake enough to want to be more awake."

He plants a kiss on top of her head, not so dramatic a move that she'll be forced to move her head from his shoulder--and he's not sitting just yet, content to remain where he is with her leaned against him like this.

"I was dreaming of a fish, I think. A large fish. It was a fine dream, hadn't turned bad yet."

She nods a little, though in truth she'd be happier to be more asleep instead. But this is nearly as good, and she lets her head rest where it is and her eyes drift shut, though she keeps her hand on Darras's. The dream gets a smile.

"Were you going to catch this fish? Or ride it? Or befriend it?"

"Last two. I wasn't at all hungry, I'd eaten a huge dinner just before. Six courses, plus a soup that I'm counting separately because it was very, very good. I'm glad we're talking about this, I'd hate to forget a dream of such significance."

He kisses her again.

"Should I keep going with this, or d'you want to tell me about yours?"

"Six courses and a soup," Yseult marvels, drawing his hand down from her neck until his arm is draped across her chest. "Quite a dream. I'm sorry I interrupted it before you could make a fish friend." She rubs his forearm with her thumb where it's clasped, just above the wrist, and lets out a breath heavy enough to suggest maybe she will tell him about hers, in a moment.

"The usual thing," she says with a little lift of her shoulders that bumps against his chest. "People dying in the next room, not being able to move to prevent it. Knowing it's my fault for putting them there in the first place."

He makes a quiet sound of acknowledgement, his arm tightening just a little so that she's held that much closer to him. There's nothing anyone can do to stop a dream from happening. There's nothing Yseult has done--or not done, as so many of her nightmares are full of inaction--to deserve such dreams.

"What do you think it means?" Well. He makes a face at himself, even if she's not looking to see it. "Not the dream itself. That makes a kind of sense. But--having the dream, over and over, nearly the same every time."

That a lot of people have died because of her, or may yet. That she's out of her depth and always has been. He's wrong on one count--she's done plenty to earn her nightmares. It's easier to tell him about the mistakes, the tragedies, those she's lost, those she's tried to save and couldn't. She lets them populate her dreams, for him, instead of those she betrayed, ruined, left for dead because the mission demanded it. She thinks she knows what he'd say, and it's not an argument she can stomach.

"That something is wrong in the Fade. Gates, or the enemy, somehow. I've always had dreams, just never so often."

"Not ones you remember. More often than you think, probably." A quiet, light correction. "I sleep next to you, remember? I would know. When I don't sleep through 'em myself," copping to that before she can raise the point for him. Darras kisses her again.

"Do you like hearing about people's dreams? I don't think I know that about you. You've put up with me telling you about mine for, what, years upon years now. But do you like it?"

Yseult cocks her head up to look at him at that correction, a frown digging a little trench between her brows. Not at him, but at the idea. It's true he'd know. She squeezes his arm, hand sliding down from elbow to wrist, and nods before he presses lips to her hair again.

"I like hearing about yours. Other people's are rarely as interesting or enlightening as they think. But yours are too strange not to be interesting, though I suspect you make most of them up. What do you think your fish meant? "

Edited 2022-07-25 04:17 (UTC)

He gives a little laugh at her honesty--that's Yseult, blunt and matter-of-fact.

"Well, as long as you find mine interesting, I s'ppose I can't complain at all. As to what my fish meant, I think I need to go track down some rum to get very philosophical and thoughtful, but... Well, I wanted to befriend it, so maybe I'm lonely. Except you're here, so that can't be it. I wanted to ride it, so maybe I'm longing for freedom. Except I'm mostly content, so that can't be it..."

Maybe it means you need to make new friends.

[ It's not a serious suggestion, but not quite a joke, either. She fits her thumb into the joint of his wrist, seeing how the pad of it fits in the curve of bone. ]

Or you need to give horses another chance.

yseult

slumber party.

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