It's that one where you have to give a speech to a crowd of bears and wasps again

[stockingfeats]

You're having a nightmare, and you aren't alone. Someone is here with you in tonight's strange, dark dreamscape--for better or for worse.

1. Chased: Bears, tentacly monsters, giant vengeful wasps. You need to escape from it but you can't find a way.
   
2. Trapped: Elevator, sinking ship, cave. You're in and you can't get out.
   
3. Performance: It's often quoted that people fear public speaking more than they fear death. You don't know the script, you've never seen this Powerpoint, the teleprompter is blurry as hell... forget falling, you're about to die on stage.
   
4. Hated: You know those dreams where everyone you know accuses you of something terrible and they all hate you now? Yeah. It's that one tonight.
   
5. Disaster! You're on an island and a volcano erupts! You're next to a river and it floods! Never mind how geologically, climatologically, or physically likely it would be in this location in real life, it's happening now.
   
6. Haunting past: Your bad memories are just waiting for you to let your guard down, and what's more unguarded than sleep?
   
7. Wildcard: There are infinite nightmares in infinite combinations... why not put together your own?
   

Comments

[nouskaiananki]

The Force mocks hubris. Someday Vader will learn this.

Tonight, however, is not that day.

Vader has damnably good shields, and despite the tether between him and Kylo, it is fairly easy for him to put shields up in place on the rare occasions he does sleep. There are multiple reasons for this, but the largest is simple: They have a levitation knot of tethers. Vader to Kylo, Kylo's Dyad with Rey, Rey to Padmé. Not to mention, the Force Bond which had started to form between him and Padmé during her pregnancy was still, somehow, present. It had the possibility to create a massive feedback loop, one Vader was wary of.

Padme was safely asleep, and Vader had gently untangled himself and tucked himself into a chair to sleep. It was more comfortable than the simple wooden chair at his workshop he used to sleep in, but still kept him upright. Being more comfortable made it more simple to fall into a deeper sleep - he didn't always like this.

Tonight he was too exhausted to fight it. Sleep took him and took him hard.

And the landscape of sleep twisted around him, smokey and black, blistered and crackling, lightning crackling in the atmosphere above him. Tendrils of organic material snake and twist after him, stalking slowly.

[jedied]

There's something familiar about it, though she's never had this dream before. The first time she'd touched the lightsaber she now wields there'd been a flash of a similar burned landscape, the air heavy with an energy she hadn't yet come to recognize yet.

She recognizes it now.

Somewhere in all that Dark is a presence she's grown more comfortable with, one that doesn't feel like a threat to her though she recognizes that it ought to be. The other is the thing that calls to her when she's too exhausted to drive it away, the thing that addresses her as granddaughter and Empress and shows her all the ways in which it could make the rest stop hurting.

It's not promising her anything now. It's just there, somewhere out of sight. Watching. A memory, perhaps, though whether her own or belonging to the other presence here she can't be sure.

"Hello?"

She doesn't open her mouth to speak; here she doesn't even seem to have a mouth. She's a whisper, a thought, here and not here at all. She shouldn't stay; she should let herself drift back into her own head and slam her own shields down behind her. But dreams are never so clear, and she can't leave the familiar presence alone here. So she follows.

[nouskaiananki]

Vader likewise has no mouth. What is actually left of him - slightly more here than home, due to proper care - is black and sooty, craggy and cracked over the surface, glowing red-orange from the cracks. He looks like lava. Where his eyes would be glow bright red, like his lightsaber.

Where his limbs would be are marked with a blue-grey haze that seems to glow from the reflected light.

Vader's posture is not relaxed. He's being hunted, he knows he's being hunted and if he fails, if he falls, then all will be lost. It has his movements unnaturally quick for him, unencumbered by the reality of the suit and various things needed to keep him alive. He's almost stepping on the balls of his feet, quick and moving, always ahead of the tendrils, moving towards a storm in the landscape - but on the other side of that storm?

Oh the other side. It's bright yellow, blues too blue to be real, green as if jewels. So bright it almost hurts.

Light.

The storm and Vader seem locked in a fatal orbit, all while he's being stalked.

The 'hello' is almost lost. Almost.

He doesn't turn towards it. But the red-orange under his skin glows brightly momentarily, and Anakin's voice seems more a breeze than words. "It's dangerous here."

[jedied]

She's vaguely aware that she ought to be afraid, but fear is for the waking. She's rarely afraid in the dreams that haunt her for days after. Dreams just are, even if sometimes they're enough that she forces herself awake rather than watch any more of one unfold. In the here and now, neither the environment nor the figure scares her enough to make her turn back, though she does take more cautious steps when the warning comes.

"I know."

It's dangerous everywhere, she'd like to reply. Show her a place where she's ever been safe. But she's here to observe, not to argue.

"You shouldn't be here alone."

The Light in the distance doesn't seem as though it gets any closer, but she keeps her gaze fixed on it in case she starts to falter. Something tells her she could be there with a thought if she chose, but she'd be leaving her companion in the Dark that's left. Whoever he'd been, he doesn't deserve that.

[nouskaiananki]

Vader knows, in a way he can't explain, that if Rey heads for the Light, it will be there. She will be pulled or fly, like a great Force Leap, to it. He, however, must confront and face the storm.

Defeat it, he thinks.

Before he can get closer to it. Because no matter how he heads in that direction, it never gets closer.

"Why? I've always been here alone." Vader turned in the direction of that whisper, glowing eyes fixed on her. There's nothing to him to suggest he's upset or sarcastic. He's simply stating a fact. "What difference does it make now?" He'd stopped as he'd been speaking with her, and the organism of the Dark, the tendrils that had been stalking him took the opportunity to surge forward, darting not at his limbs but the broken, blackened body, crashing into him and dragging him to the ground.

He didn't cry out, but he did thrash, appearing in his hands, dark blades that seem to match his blackened body, cutting at the restraints even as they pin him down and one after another crashed into him. The ground no longer seems firm, but layers upon layers of writhing things, millions of tiny slimy wriggling things, yielding under the pressure of Vader being slammed into the ground by the weight of the Dark things, soon making it difficult to even see him.