[open] there's a million, billion, trillion stars

[brightline]

who: marco & YOU
what: catch-all post; some open starters (Perimeter Guard training ground; dreamshare)
when: late Jan and Feb
where: all around the Quarantine
warnings: gore/violence in threads from the nightmare prompt; possible descriptions of morphing (body horror) in any thread - let me know in a subject line if you don't want me to go into gory detail about the not-so-magical-girl transformation sequence



i. the guard

[Thanks to his two week boot camp experience, which was probably one of the worst things he's ever endured, including some of the more nasty battles during the war, Marco's learned one very important lesson - it's totally worth it to have some hand-to-hand training. Chyler had said it herself, technique is important no matter what shape he's in. Besides, he'd spent most of boot camp getting his butt handed to him by an ever-changing round of cadets because he wasn't allowed to morph in training.

So here he is, at the Perimeter Guard training ground, totally rocking a pair of purple camo BDU pants and a T-shirt, with absolutely zero idea where to start.]

Man, this is way harder than it looks in the martial arts movies.

ii. dream a little dream

[Marco's never been one to say no to a trend, so of course he'd checked out the crystal caves. Once he'd taken a stroll through, he'd been really glad he had, too, because the whole thing had been super cool. That had been a few days ago, and after hanging up a nice little collage of some of the photos he'd taken over the mantle in one of the sitting rooms, he'd pretty much been over it.

And then the dreams begin. There's a lot of them. A lot of them are things he'd experienced as a human at home, pleasant things that twist all together - being on TV in front of all the cameras and a live audience, grinning and feeling like the center of attention; hanging out in his pool drinking a Diet Coke with the sun shining down on his face and body, feeling like he hasn't got a care in the world; the sensation of absolute relief when it had really, really sunk in that the war was over, that he didn't have to fight anymore.

Other ones are less distinctly human in nature - soaring through a blue sky, lifting off on osprey wings in the warm updraft of a good thermal, with vision so good he could see a mouse squeaking through the grass hundreds of feet below; being a dolphin leaping joyfully through the waves, with miles and miles of ocean all around, full of joy and freedom; the strength and confidence that come with being a gorilla, massive and proud and able to bench-press a small bus.

Care to join him?]

iii. the nightmare after war (violence/gore)

[Some of the dreams aren't quite so pleasant. While most of what his mind comes up with, for a blessed few nights, is good, relaxing, even fun, he's not really destined to only have good dreams. In fact, having good dreams is nowhere near as common as the bad ones.

When Marco has bad dreams, they're terrible. All violence and gore and fear and pain, his nightmares are full of the screams of animals in his ears and his friends in his head - teenagers who hadn't deserved being thrown into a war they weren't prepared to fight. The bad ones are like a camera roll of all the worst times he's almost died in morph, the feeling of his own guts in his hands, of having his face torn off, being bitten almost in half by a shark; of watching his friends get hurt, a wolf dragging her hind legs, paralyzed, a bear beating an alien with her own severed arm, a tiger leaving bloody footprints in the snow as its feet freeze to the ground over and over with every step.

The worse dreams are all about the terrible choices he's had to make. The times he'd had to fool the Yeerk controlling his own mother and lead her to what he'd been sure was her death, having to choose to save his father at the expense of his closest friends and allies. Every bad dream leaves him waking up in a panic, gasping and sweating and crying out. Some things...well, he wouldn't choose to share, but he doesn't always have a choice.]

Comments

iii. nightmares

[killthepast]

[ It figures that pleasant dreams aren't what pull his mind into a stranger's. No, it has to be the nightmares. And though he doesn't fully understand what's going on-- it's just a maelstrom of viciousness and tragedy-- Ren knows war. Except, his own experiences with battle are vastly removed from the sort of violence on display.

Blasters and lightsabers seem positively tame in comparison.

He doesn't know why he's seeing any of this play out before him. He doesn't even know what he can do. This isn't his fight, and these aren't his nightmares.

Uncertain, he moves away from the worst of it, to a wounded animal, bleeding out on the ground. Crouching down beside it, he regards it curiously, then extends a hand, to reach out to its mind with the Force, and offer it a sense of peace as he tries to understand what's going on here. Connecting with an animal, it's something he hadn't done since he was his uncle's apprentice, and he doesn't even know what-- if anything-- such an attempt will yield. This isn't real, after all. ]

[brightline]

[These are Marco's nightmares, every one of them, nightmares that echo real life, that swerve wildly between reality and strange twistings of things he remembers, horrible reality swirled up with things that happened but not at the same time - being a dog-sized flea and unable to come out of it, unable to regain his human form, melding in with the horror of morphing an ant or termite.

They're intense enough that at first, he doesn't realize that there's someone else here with him, because he's in the form of a gorilla, lying on his side, arms clutched around his belly. It's slit open, he can feel his guts, he wants to push them back inside but he can't, and he can't morph out, can't morph out, not when his brain is slowly shutting down...

And then there's someone over him. Dark gorilla eyes flick up to the hazy face above him and he sucks in a ragged breath as the man reaches out, and he feels something. Something strange. Something like thought-speak but different. A sensation that he hasn't felt since Elfangor all those years ago.]

<Who are you? What are you doing to me?>

[The voice is thought-speak, Marco's voice inside the other man's head, a telepathic communication.]