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Posted: Sat Jun 10, 2017 9:55 am
There was no merciful moment of forgetfulness when he woke. Jordan knew. He was trapped in this dream of being a horseman, a dream in which he had a life, a purpose, a family, where he was where he wanted to be and happy with it, and none of it was real. It was all wrong, and he knew what was real, and still he was curled up in the comfort of a home he didn't belong in, beside partners he wasn't supposed to be with. He made a small pained involuntary sound and pressed his face into the pillow. He didn't want to remember, and he allowed himself a little time to selfishly mourn the death of the dream he'd been living in.
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Posted: Sat Jun 10, 2017 5:45 pm
Rep woke with a haze of contentment which superseded the confusion and upset which had gone before, replacing it with comfort and warmth. He didn't know where he was but that was something he took in stride because he was in a bed. Being in a warm bed meant on the whole that he was safe.
He stirred, reached out and wrapped his arms around a warm body, burying his face in his hair and inhaling.
"Mmmornin Jrrdan." he said lazily, the r rolled like a cat's purr.
And then the intervening years washed in and he realised this wasn't right, it didn't sit properly, he shouldn't be in bed with Jordan. Maybe everything since then had been a dream, maybe everything was fine and how it used to be.
And then that hazy bubble of happiness was popped by another thought.
Maybe he'd gotten drunk or something.
It was like a bucket of cold water. "Wait what the ********?" he said, not sitting up but opening his eyes.
"Where the ******** are we?" he asked, rapidly realising he had a warmth to the other side of him and reaching back with a hand in search of Harrison.
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Posted: Sun Jun 11, 2017 12:29 pm
"Aw, ********," Harrison said, less worried about the bed situation and more worried about everything else. "I know what baby blood tastes like. I know that now. I'm never gonna get that out of my head. Where's-"
"AhhhHHHHHHHHHHH," Came a too-human wail from an adjacent room. And then, more muffled, "They...they don't have wireless internet here...."
"At least B0nez is okay," Harrison said, sitting up and deciding he'd woken up on more than the wrong side of the bed.
"What are you both looking mopey over," he accused Rep and Jordan "It's not like I've not seen the two of you...horse naked before. It uh," he stiffened, "You said Jordan, right? It is you guys, right?"
He braced himself in case both of them looked at him shiftily and asked him a thousand questions about honor on the battlefield.
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Posted: Sun Jun 11, 2017 1:07 pm
"We're still dreaming," Jordan said, sounding resigned. "Except that now we're aware of it." He tensed up a little and sat up, studying both Rep and Harrison to make sure that they were also aware, that he wasn't the only one suddenly remembering being a hunter. They both sounded like they were aware of something being different, at least. "It's me," he said to Harrison. A little reluctantly, he moved to get out of the bed and leaned over to pick his robe off the floor. "I guess we're going to have to figure out how to wake up before we forget we need to." That was the real question, wasn't it? "Did you guys dream about the Alice program too?" he asked. "It sounds like there's more than one influence on whatever's going on here." He needed to find where Ferros had gone off to. His mind was quiet, and it set him on edge; the occasional weird s**t that separated them was always unnerving. This particular instance had a lot of weird s**t going on. "Oh, s**t," he said, and sat back down on the edge of the bed, "the kids, what do we do about that," and wasn't that just a ******** head trip? They weren't real. They were a dream. But all of them were stuck in this dream. And there was something decidedly, unsettlingly familiar about Mask.
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Posted: Sun Jun 11, 2017 1:21 pm
Rep recovered fairly quickly to their situation. He'd gotten used to waking up not sure who or where he was every morning after blue kingdom's influence. This was mainly distressing because normally when he woke up he was himself again, not stuck in the dream.
"It's me." Rep said grimly. He wasn't worried about Tracey, not because he didn't need the weapon - he was his other half - but because like someone who owned a cat, he knew he was somewhere and would come back when he was hungry.
"I dreamed about it." he said, though it wasn't familiar beyond something Mimsy had talked about a few times. At the mention of the kids though there was a twist in his gut, so close to memories of fatherhood and pride that they remained a raw and lingering longing in his chest. They might not have been real but they were his, they were theirs.
"I think we just keep looking after them." he said in a quiet voice. "I don't want them to get hurt." Even Mask, who he was becoming more and more aware was a lot stranger than even he'd thought before. "Mask said he was in a dream too."
What he didn't say, but which he thought anyway, was that he was oddly glad it was all three of them here in the bed. He felt safer with all of them there, more protected and capable than if it was just him tasked with protecting Harrison against whatever all of this was. "At this rate I'm going to ******** lose what reality is the proper one."
He shook his head. "I was offered this. This life, this world. Before. I said no. I'm a hunter, and I still ******** am, even if I have wings."
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Posted: Sun Jun 11, 2017 1:44 pm
"I dunno," Harrison said testily, "You sure you don't want to gang up on them and stab them until they wake up? ...Joking." He said, feeling like here a grim joke or two wasn't too tasteless. Apocalyptic murder was the name of the game. But it lended him a little more understanding about the psychopaths. They were loyal to their own kind, mostly. And they were still gigantic genocidal arrogant assholes.
"Hey," he said cheering a little, "You think they all- the Horsemen, I mean, got turned into humans, and that's who we were killing and enslaving and all the whole time? Turnabout's fair play and all."
He puffed out a noise, getting off the bed to look at his 50 layers of armor and grabbing jeans and a t-shirt out of Rep's closet instead.
"Whoever you was talking to needs better ears," he said. "Could be worse, I guess. Could have been waking up with Gale or Jerry or some s**t. We make nice-looking...I guess it's foals, technically."
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Posted: Sun Jun 11, 2017 1:56 pm
Jordan winced slightly. The joke was uncomfortable on several levels, and he didn't respond to it. "Seems like it'd be logical for things to have been reversed," he said instead. It felt strange to have any sympathy for Horsemen. He couldn't afford to go too far down that path, he reminded himself.
"Mask said he could fix it, too," he reminded Rep. "Kind of wondering what he meant by that." He got up again and went about getting dressed, putting on the layers of robes, half out of residual reflex and half out of a lingering caution about not knowing who else might be awake within the dream or not.
"Could be worse," he agreed tiredly, and did not say that it had been a pretty good dream. He was decidedly ambivalent about this whole pattern of dreams that offered him what he wanted.
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Posted: Sun Jun 11, 2017 2:07 pm
Rep gave Harrison a downright scandalised look for his suggestion, not finding it funny, simply alarming and a bit vicious. It was enough to shut him up for a moment, simply looking at the sheets rather than at anyone around him. He couldn't find himself thinking about hurting the kids even in jest without anything other than a roiling nausea and aversion to the very concept.
Rep watched Jordan dress. This body he had was different in some ways but in others was as familiar as the day he'd left.
He knew who Mask was, knew it at the same time as he knew that in this dream he was their kid. Creation was a little s**t, but this time he'd done nothing wrong.
"Could have been worse but I don't think it could have been better." was all he had to say.
He didn't bother moving to get dressed.
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Posted: Sun Jun 11, 2017 2:21 pm
Harrison watched Rep watch Jordan dress, and it was one thing to say, hey, they all knew each other here so nobody had to be embarrassed, and another to soak it in.
"Couldn't be better," He repeated flatly.
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Posted: Sun Jun 11, 2017 2:31 pm
Jordan turned, his eyes flicking between Rep and Harrison as he finished braiding his hair and tying it off. The tension was palpable, and what it meant was deeply uncomfortable, a conflict laid out naked that he'd been only peripherally aware of. He bit back the urge to apologize, longing mixing with anger.
"I don't know how much time we're going to have," he said. "The dream suggested that the awareness of ourselves is temporary. We should see what we can find out while we're still lucid." His lips pressed briefly into a thin line. "If ... if we've got other things to discuss, we can discuss them after we survive this."
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Posted: Sun Jun 11, 2017 2:39 pm
Rep gave Harrison a slightly alarmed look at his tone, somewhat stricken by it and suddenly finding himself feeling both self conscious and stupid. He'd been too honest, too happy and too open about this world when it was obvious there were still problems in the other one.
He gritted his teeth tight and looked away. What did it matter what they found out while they could think if they'd only lose it all again when everything went back to how it was?
He wanted to ask what the issue was but figured it was easier to stay quiet instead.
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Posted: Sun Jun 11, 2017 2:54 pm
"Oh, no, why don't we discuss it now?" Harrison said. "Why don't we discuss how there's three guys who are minus some clothes in the room, and how between your husband and your ex you've only got eyes for one of them? And how it's not me? And how life like we got it is somehow worse?"
"False alarm," Bonez's voice came in from the other room, "Everything is aaaaaalright. There is wireless. So everybody's....um," He inched his way awkwardly into the room, scratching his too-thin body. "Ooohkay?" He guessed. "Boil, you'd think they'd fix these mods, huh?"
"B0nez," Harrison said, sounding kind of stricken, "Could you buzz off for a while, pal? This is all kinda serious."
B0nez looked at Harrison, then looked at Rep and Jordan with a suddenly accusing look, like they'd been tampering with his PC while he was out of the room.
"Oooooookay tell you what, instead of that," B0nez wormed his way over to where Harrison was trying to tug his shirt all the way down and giving his wings an irritated flap, "Why don't we not miss out on any like, easter eggs while we're here and go see if there's like, some swag that doesn't involve bombing your heart level quests?" He got behind Harrison, steering him doorward.
"Why don't you guys just spend the time ******** instead?" Harrison asked, "Why work? Why...solve mysteries, why do anything else, when nothing else could possibly be better?"
B0nez scuffed his sneakers on the floor pushing the sturdier, taller man towards the door.
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Posted: Sun Jun 11, 2017 3:08 pm
Jordan took a hissing breath through his teeth, guilt and anger boiling in him. "So," he said, keeping his voice as even as he could, "if we're going to discuss this, then. Is the reason you've been assuring me you'd be just fine with me finding someone, is that so I'll ******** off and get out of the way permanently at last?"
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Posted: Sun Jun 11, 2017 3:14 pm
Rep wasn't emotionally prepared to deal with this sort of thing at all. Mostly he was upset about the kids, his comment about things being good hadn't just been about Jordan. He was trying to process snapping back into reality again after having had a purpose, people who loved and depended on him, only to find that none of it was real at all. It had shaken him, and Harrison getting properly pissed off about everything was the final blow that fractured the very fragile self control he'd been trying to maintain.
He immediately turned every single bit of what was going on into a weapon against himself. People were fighting because of him, the initial argument was because of him, he'd hurt Jordan and now he'd hurt Harrison just by looking at someone else and by saying another world was better than theirs. It was his fault, he was genuinely a shitty person and he could not do anything right at all.
He couldn't even handle this whole argument right, he knew it as he could feel the weight of emotion settling across the back of his head like a weight on his shoulders, his eyes prickling with tears that he knew he couldn't stop no matter how hard he tensed and braced against them.
Bringing his hands up to his face and bowing his head he instinctually wrapped his wings about himself. B0nez being involved somehow made it worse, simply validating the feelings that things were his fault. Even deep down he felt like perhaps this whole thing, the dream and everything to do with it was also in some way his fault. He'd been meddling with the legacies after all.
"I wasn't looking at him over you." he said, his voice smaller than usual, not able to hide the fact that he was almost certainly in tears.. "I was just looking. I love you."
He just loved both of them was all.
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Posted: Sun Jun 11, 2017 3:30 pm
"It's because we're not dating! We're not together, you broke up, so move on," Harrison said, bracing himself against the door and turning around in spite of B0nez's shoving. "It's not malicious, you crazy b*****d! What, you think Rep is the nicer guy because he won't get with you and he lets you know he'll cut you off anyone else does? If Rep had his way everybody except him would be wearing chastity belts, and he'd be the one with the keyring. Not that he'd use them. He just wants everybody in not-sex-with-him stasis."
Bonez could not be less enthused about this quest line.
The aggression, however, drained out of his tone some as Rep crumpled.
"Aw- l-look, Rep, come on. I love you too. I just- I just thought we had all this resolved. What changed, how come you're both acting like something's changed?"
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