Dirk Strider (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
string_instrument) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thenashira2025-11-18 09:44 pm
string_instrument) wrote in thenashira2025-11-18 09:44 pm
All Night, Me And My Wretched Device
Who: Nova Pastos, Lil Cal, the Abyss, and-- (you!)
What: Catch-all for Nova Pastos' time in the Abyss
When: 7/31 and on until they're saved
Where: The. Uh. The Abyss.
Warnings: Suicidal ideation, derealisation and depersonalisation, break with reality, child neglect, more to be added as things are written
Like failure itself, the Abyss knocks the wind from him.
Not physically, and not like a punch, but mentally and like the hard, bone-shattering impact with the water's surface tension. It cracks across his psyche just like that, splintering across the sheer plane of his mind. It wants him to break first, of that he's sure, but he doesn't.
The pain, however, wraps around his brain the same way his body was engulfed by ocean--in that dream.
But this is not the Abyss of his ocean. In some ways, it's similar. Endless, with an infinite depth and a vastness of existence that renders any single living object irrelevant. But it still has solid ground, and gravity, and air to breathe. The terrain varies from lifeless sand to gritty soil, peppered with inert rock. It's like the earthy quasi-beach before one reaches the ocean shore, but without ever seeing the sea at all.
There is no ocean.
The dark sky yawns hollow above him, void of sun or moon or stars.
This is also reminiscent of the ocean, but without the pressure, the movement, or the power. It's thin and strange and empty. There is an absence, a death of substance, that he feels every time he breathes in, filling his lungs with nothing and leaving him aching for purchase, for presence, for reality--for any sense of realness at all. It is as though reality itself has disincorporated him, and it...
It is horribly familiar.
It feels like home. Like his penthouse suite, its rooftop 168 metres in the air, a perfectly isolated habitat soaring above the Chalra skyline and filled with a restless accumulation of stuff. Computers, horse statues, movie posters, horse prints, puppets, furniture, weaponry, mechanical dreams, workout equipment.
But it never felt any less empty.
Now, in this uncanny echo of that infinity of loneliness, that lonely infinitude--the reality he holds in his mind gives way to the tangible waste of his existence. It seeps into him through the cracks of his broken heart--the soup can, rent asunder into mere atoms, compressed and devoured by the sea. A discaded husk whose failure was inevitable. And that was okay. It was always meant to be.
But not like this. Not like this. There is nowhere for him to go, nothing for his essential nature to become.
This is not his ocean.
There is no ocean.
This is just stone, and grit, and Nova Pastos, and Lil Cal.
And--
What: Catch-all for Nova Pastos' time in the Abyss
When: 7/31 and on until they're saved
Where: The. Uh. The Abyss.
Warnings: Suicidal ideation, derealisation and depersonalisation, break with reality, child neglect, more to be added as things are written
Like failure itself, the Abyss knocks the wind from him.
Not physically, and not like a punch, but mentally and like the hard, bone-shattering impact with the water's surface tension. It cracks across his psyche just like that, splintering across the sheer plane of his mind. It wants him to break first, of that he's sure, but he doesn't.
The pain, however, wraps around his brain the same way his body was engulfed by ocean--in that dream.
But this is not the Abyss of his ocean. In some ways, it's similar. Endless, with an infinite depth and a vastness of existence that renders any single living object irrelevant. But it still has solid ground, and gravity, and air to breathe. The terrain varies from lifeless sand to gritty soil, peppered with inert rock. It's like the earthy quasi-beach before one reaches the ocean shore, but without ever seeing the sea at all.
There is no ocean.
The dark sky yawns hollow above him, void of sun or moon or stars.
This is also reminiscent of the ocean, but without the pressure, the movement, or the power. It's thin and strange and empty. There is an absence, a death of substance, that he feels every time he breathes in, filling his lungs with nothing and leaving him aching for purchase, for presence, for reality--for any sense of realness at all. It is as though reality itself has disincorporated him, and it...
It is horribly familiar.
It feels like home. Like his penthouse suite, its rooftop 168 metres in the air, a perfectly isolated habitat soaring above the Chalra skyline and filled with a restless accumulation of stuff. Computers, horse statues, movie posters, horse prints, puppets, furniture, weaponry, mechanical dreams, workout equipment.
But it never felt any less empty.
Now, in this uncanny echo of that infinity of loneliness, that lonely infinitude--the reality he holds in his mind gives way to the tangible waste of his existence. It seeps into him through the cracks of his broken heart--the soup can, rent asunder into mere atoms, compressed and devoured by the sea. A discaded husk whose failure was inevitable. And that was okay. It was always meant to be.
But not like this. Not like this. There is nowhere for him to go, nothing for his essential nature to become.
This is not his ocean.
There is no ocean.
This is just stone, and grit, and Nova Pastos, and Lil Cal.
And--
no subject
He doesn't actually experience the impact at all--he has that thought, he feels the hit, and then he's on the ground with Cal on his face and dirt in his teeth, his lungs paralysed from shock before he can breathe again.
Which, for a man who rarely experiences true unconsciousness even by sleep, is a far more jarring and discomforting experience than the simple humiliation of losing a fight. Cal, draped on his face, doesn't help him at all; he uses one hand to pull the puppet away from his inability to breathe or see.
"D--" he starts to ask--or tries to. Instead he coughs, and blinks, and recoups for a second.
"Did... I just... get my ass kicked by the weather?" he manages at last, after several seconds spent struggling for enough oxygen to speak.
Questionable use of breath and energy, but not entirely without reason. He'd been so fixated on the ocean's depths--thanks in no small part to his dream--that the surface and beyond hadn't merited much metaphorical consideration.
Rules atop the ocean... okay. His chest hurts, deeply. That hurt.
Fuck the weather demon, he thinks.
But he doesn't get up quite yet.
He can just... lie here in the dirt. It's fine.
He'll move... soon.
Eventually.