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

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.

Chased: Bears, tentacly monsters, giant vengeful wasps. You need to escape from it but you can't find a way.
Trapped: Elevator, sinking ship, cave. You're in and you can't get out.
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.
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.
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.
Haunting past: Your bad memories are just waiting for you to let your guard down, and what's more unguarded than sleep?
Wildcard: There are infinite nightmares in infinite combinations... why not put together your own?

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Jeremy felt the edge of something like a fearful, hysterical laugh start to bubble up. He was able to quickly reign it in before sounding as crazy as he feared he was. "My dream. Does that mean my subconscious or just a reflection of it here in your world?" Jeremy was pleased to hear his voice reflecting the calm that he had wanted.

"Both?" Ronan said with a small shrug. He wasn't sure, and the specifics like that had never mattered to him. It was a real place in that Dreamers, Magicians, they could reach out to one another and exist at the same time within it. If that precluded one of the options he didn't know and didn't much care.

"It works because it works. Dream logic," he explained.

"Not the best option," Jeremy said, looking out at the storm-tossed sea beyond them. "My mind is a terrifying powerhouse... and my subconscious remains the most broken part of me."

Still, he had to try, didn't he? Closing his eyes he focused on the feeling of his form. Leaning on solid feeling radiating from Ronan next to him, Jeremy sought his own calm control. Red light flickered along the edges of Jeremy's body as it existed in this strange universe that spread along the Coil to wherever dreaming minds were. Jeremy guessed that was the unusual kind of place this was, at any rate. And, as Ronan, had suggested he pushed against the angry roil of nightmare-expanding the calm he felt and created something like an eye in the storm. It was a start.

Jeremy opened his eyes and watched the sea beyond Ronan's incandescent barrier retreat. As it retreated it revealed a young boy. Jeremy recognized the boy as himself, as he had been at maybe age ten. The skin on the boy's knuckles was bloody and broken, and he stared across the space and over thirty years at Jeremy.

"Does it get better?" young Jeremy asked of himself.

With little thinking, Jeremy crossed through the barrier to kneel before his younger self. The water was now little more than ankle deep and continued to flow out into the dark. "No," he said. In his dark, young eyes Jeremy thought he saw something small start to break. "But, it does get easier to carry. And sometimes," he glanced back at the man who had come so thoughtlessly to his aid, "people will come to your side because it is the right thing to do."

His young self's eyes gained a look of resolve. Pulling himself up to his full, scrawny, height he nodded once before melting back into the receding water. Jeremy continued to kneel, not quite yet ready to finish the struggle with his subconsious.

Ronan knew what it was like, to be afraid of your own mind. The night terrors no longer hunted him in his dreams, not for years, but he still remembered the sharpness of their claws, the way they tried to tear him apart. Back when he didn't know who he was, what he was, in so many more ways than one.

Talking about your feelings wasn't exactly Ronan Lynch's way, but - he was learning. How to talk to others - how to give help in a way they needed. Especially here. He reached out to press a hand to Jeremy's shoulder, steady and solid.

"I used to dream of feathered monsters that tried to kill me. Any time I'd fall asleep, there they were, ready to rip me to shreds. I'd wake up with wounds they inflicted on me."

Jeremy flinched at the sudden contact. A brief tensing before he gradually relaxed again. He had already taken Ronan's hand earlier, and this posed no more danger than that had. It was probably foolish, but Jeremy only worried about what he might do with that kind of contact. Further, he had gone a long time without human warmth before he had been locked away, so long that he struggled to recognize it when it was directed at him.

It sounded like Ronan had suffered his own terrible trials. "Did you find it difficult to ask for help?" Jeremy asked.

"It was impossible," Ronan admitted easily now. Now that his secret was long out, here in the world of dreams. "I can take things from dreams into reality - that's why the injuries carried over. My friends thought I was trying to kill myself and I couldn't tell them the truth."

He hadn't been, but at the same time in a way he had. Those nightmares were just him.

"Eventually I was able to."

Being able to pull a thing created on dream logic into a world that did not operate under the same rules seemed to Jeremy like quite the ability. Ronan's world was probably not filled to the gills with superpowers and magic, otherwise, it would not have been such a difficult topic.

"I'm glad you had friends and were able to tell them. If only so that now you would be here to save me from myself."

"Pretty sure there's a lot of pithy statements about shit happening for a reason," Ronan said simply, without particular complaint. Sometimes he did wonder how much free will came into it.

"In my experience, that reason is your past. Making a choice without its influence is nearly impossible. Even deciding to go against what you would normally choose is still based on something happening to push you to that contrariness." Jeremy chuckled as he pushed himself up to his feet. "Sorry, I've had a lot of time to think about the nature of free will and how outside actors could fabricate something like destiny."

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

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