my friends are so depressed

[lavelly]

CHARACTERS: Sam, Shiro, Lavellan
WHERE: Station 72
WHEN: Day :39 (we suck)
SUMMARY: Shiro and Lavellan have remarkably similar current and past traumas and have an incident. Sam is the lucky designated mental housekeeper.
WARNINGS: Nightmares, trippy bullshit, references to medical trauma and forced amputation, eggs, probably secondhand embarrassment.

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LEMME KNOW IF THIS WORKS

[shiro2hero]

[He doesn't remember falling asleep. Doesn't remember a lot about the day, honestly. Hard to process anything beyond grieving and trying desperately to recover from it. To scrape his shields together enough to function, and keep others from falling too. Wanting to do something for the others, but not knowing how or what.]

[He must have just collapsed. Knowing himself, it was in a chair or something, brain and body finally giving out on him.]

[It's too much to hope he isn't going to dream.]

[This one... this is different, though. This is something like another planet. Something they haven't encountered before. Where light flickers between green and purple, where mountains seem to hang like asteroids in the air, mixed and twisted up with familiar metal hulls of ships and the arching, clouded colors of familiar nebulae. Buildings spot the landscape, crouched, stony husks amid glittering metallic structures -- like pieces of the castle ship and Galra stations scattered around.]

[What... is he seeing?]

[Where is this? And -- ]

[And before his brain can continue on that train of thought, something rips along his right arm. Something white-hot like lightning. He grasps his arm, shocked, for a split second, to feel living skin and muscle instead of metal. But it hurts.]

[He's staggering toward the nearest building, clutching at his arm, at the place where metal should be meeting flesh, fingers alternating between glowing purple and oozing green sparks. Sometimes the hand isn't his anymore, sometimes it's something smaller, someone else's entirely.]

[That scares him more than the pain.]

IT PERF UR PERF

[lavelly]

[meanwhile back at the ranch

He's dreamed of things like this before, frequently even, but never like this. He was never so aware before, for one thing--dreams have a funny way of never feeling like dreams at the time. But he knows he's dreaming now, somehow, and that these--these additions, these images--are not the normal strangeness of nightmares. They're like a foreign presence, creeping in. Like a demon reaching out to him from the Fade.

But he's barely felt the Fade since he came to this "station." And this, whatever this is, is strong. Immediate. Powerful.

His arm doesn't hurt, and that's the strangest thing, because in these dreams it's always hurt. Instead it's--numb. Hard. It's become some alien substance, it doesn't belong to him--and at the edges of his vision are demons that he's never seen before, that are like nothing he recognizes, purple and animalistic and horrible. He can't move his limbs and there's a strange chemical smell that permeates everything, and the demons are doing things to him he doesn't understand, removing things and adding others and what is happening why his body doesn't belong to him

then he's free and he's running and how? a demon helped him there are hands but he breaks loose and something is happening to his arm it's shifting but he has to ignore it he runs and runs and runs

words are shouted after him in a language he doesn't know and he runs until he's somewhere else entirely he's in the crossroads he's--in a castle? a castle of metal? nothing makes sense--

he has to stop and collapses against a wall, his arm shifting between huge and iron and purple and dead to green and pain, the pain is there again cracks stream down his palm like broken glass and then back to dead, leaden weight, what is happening someone wake him up]

[shiro2hero]

[None of the faces flickering on the edges of his vision make any sense. They aren't familiar, not this time. And that never happens to him. Some of them seem distressed, some he feels like he knows, like he's seen them before. But he's never been in this place, not in a dream or reality.]

[Things are moving through this place, wispy, indeterminate things. Large, hulking things whispering of power and his hand is on fire. He wants to cry out, but if he does, something is going to take notice. How he knows that is a mystery. It's like something someone else told him, long ago. Some memory locked away under more familiar dreams of dust and bright lights overhead --]

[--something does flash above him, and for a second, he ducks. Expecting the dreams to take a more normal turn. But it isn't white. It isn't blinding and it doesn't smell of blood.]

[It's green and crackling like lightning and there's pressure on his arm, on his hand, like something is threatening to rip apart from the inside. And he does cry out, then, like he does in every other dream. What is happening, why is this happening what is this and why can't he wake up?]

[He can feel someone holding onto his arm, onto the hand, someone unfamiliar and indistinct, and can't pull away--]

[Why can't I wake up?]