this is the way of it [OPEN]

[firstroar]

Date & Time: 1/18 -> end of Jan
Location: near and around a bed
Characters: Soldier Blue, tbd
Summary: a psychic dying tends to dreamhop or suck nearby people into his own dreams.
Warnings: dying, references to such, any bad memories lying about in any given headspace


The way of it was unprecedented in his world: If any Mu before him had lived a life to its full extent, it was done so hidden away from notice. All others suffered and inevitably died far, far too young. Too many children.

Soldier Blue found his eyes wouldn't open, his body barely stir, disobeying every command just the way it had at the start of his fifteen-year sleep. He'd been so much more resigned to that, back then. Secure as he could be in the faith he had in his successor, his comrades. Here, though? Here, he wasn't so sure.

Throughout the days that passed, he found the strength to exert, push his mind away from the prison of his body, if only for a moment. But he'd lose himself in doing that, lose the purpose, drift and find himself straying into dreams or the passing presence of more focused, willful minds, some more familiar than others. It all twisted into pasts distant and near, making for disorienting journeys that often ended in the darkness that he constantly tried to shake himself from, harder and harder each time.

He chased the specks of light he perceived in the place of those thoughts and dreams, feeling weight bearing down upon his body the further he reached. Warmth on his cheek, the gentle breathy voice of his goddess...or some other? Everything blended together so seamlessly that the tears reality caused were frightening.

His reach shrank and lights grew distant like stars, became stars, a canopy of a hundred-years old vigil in an entirely different world.

Ataraxion? Exsilium? He couldn't say, not without someone to tell him the right of it. Whether they were ghosts or truly present, though...

Comments

[gamora]

"Don't be ridiculous." Don't do this to her. She already knows she won't have Quill or Adam whenever this universe throws her back into her own, and it'll tear her away from everyone she's met and it's something she's been not thinking about since she's realized it.

Gamora can't look at him, just stares at a point over his head with all the focus she can manage. "You're not dying, they can bring you back."

She knows they can.

[firstroar]

"Gamo–" You're not dying cuts him off, and he quiets, letting her have her piece. But it's with a pained expression he watches her, feeling guilt in him like a dozen tightening knots.

When the chance to speak again comes again, he takes it. "To what end? Gamora, I..." His head dipped and shook. "There's nothing else I can do...for the people here." For her, too. But saying that seemed too much.

[gamora]

It's so similar to something that Adam might say that Gamora finds her hands tightening into fists and anger creeping into her voice. It's not how she'd want to spend her last conversation with Blue, but she can't help it.

"Then find something else." It's what she does, to keep going. To find a new purpose no matter how shallow it may to be to go from one day to the next. "I've had my share of dealing with self-sacrificing idiots."

But she can accept Quill, Rider, and Adam's sacrifices because they meant something. They saved the universe however pointless she might have thought their deaths were. This - this isn't that. It's giving up.

[firstroar]

Even if it weren't in the space of her dreams, Gamora's will is an unstoppable force regardless of whether or not it's focused on a precise point or just the world at large. Fighting against it is like a sapling trying to stand upright in a hurricane. It makes the ground (well, imagining of it) seem shifty and not altogether there to stand firm upon, but while the heat backing her agitation does burn, it's something he can accept. It's hers, after all.

"Pointless," he utters, echoing one of the notions behind her words. He looks up again. "Is that what it will be, when it happens?"

[gamora]

"It was for me." Which is strange to talk about, and Gamora levels Blue a look. "I attempted to kill Thanos when I found out he was going to destroy the universe. He killed me instead."

There's no trace of ill-will in her tone, she doesn't hate him and maybe she should but that's never been a question. How can you hate someone who gave you a chance at living, who gave you a purpose? She was there for a reason, a tool to be used, and yet he cared.

But her death - it was pointless. It accomplished nothing. What happened after, that excellent moment of perfect happiness that lasted seven years, doesn't change the facts of her death.

[firstroar]

What happened after, just the notion of it, is what Blue searches for. He remembers it from their talk before, worried and wondered on it then, kept it to heart for all this time...

"Gamora, I..." His brow pinches, showing the struggle. "I don't understand. When we spoke before...when you told me of your death, of what you found...How could it be pointless?"

[gamora]

"How--" Her eyes narrow, and she gives him a look. "Because." That's not an answer, and her brow furrows as she tries to spit it out. "What happens doesn't matter. Not if you don't know what's coming after."

She's always lucky, always doomed to carry on even though the universe throws everything it can at her to break her, gives her things she wants and then tears them away from her.

"I wouldn't have achieved anything with my death. That's what makes it pointless."

[firstroar]

"It's..." Blue's impulse to refuse overtook his reasons to refuse at all, and he has to hesitate and think about it. His head shakes. "It's...part of why you're here now. Why I..." Part of why he's there. He believes that.

[gamora]

"I'm here now because I was pulled out of my own universe. I'm here because it's what I dreamed of."

Saying that she doesn't mean to be irritable would be a lie - it touches on everything Gamora so desperately doesn't want to think or talk about. But there's no place to run from a conversation that takes place in her dreams, no way to simply leave and refuse to deal with it.

And she hates that she feels caged just as much as anything.

[firstroar]

Blue's eyes close, his expression pained. He endures it, though; her place, her rules, her reasons. They're as important – no, more important than his here. And what does arguing change? As much as he craves to be understood, he can't force it.

His head lifts with the long breath he takes, an illusion of necessity that does enough to give him some strength to move, to back away, to press the palm of his hand against the wall behind him. Imagined, but alive because of it.

"When you wake up," he says, opening his eyes, looking at the ceiling, "what will you do? Where are you going from here?"

[gamora]

She doesn't know.

It's something she'd been avoiding thinking about the closer their goal appears to be. If she wasn't randomly snatched away back to her universe, what would she do? Returning meant facing a universe without purpose - how was she to live like that? But what other choice does she have? Her universe, while empty of those she might have considered friends, was still her's.

Or did he mean it in the way Adam always does? Not physically, but mentally. It doesn't change her answer any, when she responds.

"What I always do. I go on."