[open] a friend in need's a friend indeed

[nedofpies]

Who: Ned and OPEN
What: Random encounters & fallout from dream-walking tomfoolery
Where: House 20, the garden, anywhere around town
When: Day 89

It's been a long week. A long, mostly-sleepless, weird week during which Ned has seen far more of his friends' and neighbors' subconsciouses than he would have liked to. Plus, a creepy city made of crystals that everyone seems to have seen, but no one will claim as their own. Shady stuff. Today, he is determined to wear himself out. Perhaps if he's tired enough, whatever mojo the men behind the curtain have put on him won't be strong enough to stir him out of a deep and dreamless sleep.

It's probably a futile tactic, but he can't just do nothing.

So he is a bustle of activity - cleaning the house, walking around town, checking on the crops to see if they are holding up well (carefully, with an eye for any enterprising tigers roaming too close to the edge of the forest), keeping an eye out for new faces and an ear out for rumors of missing ones.

Comments

[enchangement]

It takes a moment between that hug and River's ensuing giggle, but it does happen. A process, then: no emotion so deep she can drown in it, a drop of each feeling to make it's own cocktail. Stability, the only way that River can experience it here, without becoming something she never was before again.

"Had it been a voluntary exchange, an open door to walk through or reject, if it had been a choice then it would be different. Knowing they are still, safe, frozen, knowing as best as knowing can be had doesn't change the concern, the feeling of tilted poles and things not where they should be."

She tilts her chin up and smiles at Ned. "Sleeping better?" People seem to be more in their own heads and less in the minds of others, now, but River sometimes feels like there's an edge to that. A veil that's been disturbed and won't be made whole and solid again.

[nedofpies]

Ned's smile goes a bit crooked and half-sad, because what she is saying makes perfect sense to him. Concern doesn't work like that. Missing people doesn't work like that. River is still, despite all the logic and reassurances and inevitabilities in the world, separated from her wonderful makeshift family. Ned understands that more than ever. He also understands how hard it must be for her, just staying in this one place. How on that ship, mobility was freedom, home was being always on the move.

He's never had that kind of life for himself: at least, not in his waking life. He's always stayed relatively still, and moments of movement were often enough stressful affairs. Leaving Coeur d'Coeurs, leaving boarding school and finding his way to the city, having to shift himself from shitty apartment to shitty apartment when things got too unlivable, ending up here.

"Much better," he says, and means it, too. Perhaps all that dream-walking had worn his subconscious out, but it's been days since he had a nightmare. That's a good streak, for him. Then, because it's sort of his big-brotherly job, he asks, "When's the last time you got a bit of shut-eye?"

[enchangement]

River tilts her head from side to side before simply shrugging. "Hard to tell." Half evasion, half truth. "Moments and snatches and naps are better than hours of everything in front of a backdrop of a void that has been disrupted and shifted into something else, something un-new, something different."

She gives Ned another hug as a response. "Not tired right now." Which is true. She wants to be awake. When she doesn't want to be awake, well. If it is bad she can get Charles' help, a word and intent that will either make her sleep or ...not. They're still working out the kinks of how her mind actually responds to telepathic suggestion.

"Did you learn anything?"

[nedofpies]

"From the dreams?"

He lets out a laugh that's just a touch unhinged; it's better to laugh at his situation than any other alternative. "Much, much more than I ever wanted to know."

It might only be a fraction of what River deals with every day, but Ned thinks he can understand a little more fully, how hard it must be for her, to have everyone else's minds and memories before her like an open book she can't look away from. Respecting the privacy of others was never an option for her, and in return, everything they've experienced becomes something she must experience tangentially, vicariously.

He'd seen too much, drawn too many conclusions from what he'd seen. Not all of it had been so bad: there had been Riley as a jaguar cub, romping through the underbrush, and Simon and Kaylee and the rest of River's family in the stars. But there had also been Meyer as a child, stony-faced and unblinking, and Jesse in that bathtub, and more.

"What about you?" he asks, with a wry twist to his smile. It's not impossible that River learned some things that she didn't know before, from the dreams. But it's also possible that he's just teasing her, very gently.

[enchangement]

River smiles. She learned a few things but she isn't sure what good knowing them is. How much of it is her, and how much of it is the world. The problem with sharing dreams is that sometimes it manages to chip away at her sense of reality.

Still. "You weren't always tall, and dogs can get everything wet in less than a tenth of a second."

[nedofpies]

Ned laughs again at that, but it is a stabler, fonder laugh, this time. "They're very good at that, yes. And no, I wasn't. I was the smallest kid my age for quite a few years." He doesn't ask if River turned up in anyone else's dreams. She hadn't volunteered the information, so he figures it isn't his place to pester, particularly when there's nothing to be gained from it.

He thinks back over the dream now, again, as he has been on and off since it happens. "I think the strangest thing was being younger than you. Or... thinking I was younger than you, for a while." Of course, there had also been the way River interacted with the people in the white coats, at the very beginning, how she had held his hand and dragged him out of the familiar nightmare. "Strange how... real it feels. Like all of it actually happened, even though I know it really didn't."