Room 210; Very Early Thursday Morning [08/20].

[white_oleander]

Nightmares were nothing new for Astrid,; she'd always had them. Well, she'd had them ever since the death of Barry Kolker, and the whirlwind of events that set into place, meaning she'd been whimpering and tossing in her sleep since pretty much her first night at Fandom. She was used to them by now; she suspected Sabine was used to them now, too, but that night, her dreams had been...different. They weren't moody Impressionist scenes filled with more feeling than physical substance, they weren't flashes and snippets of various little moment in her life, they didn't have that overwhelming feeling of longing and loneliness that they usually had. They were....desperate, in a different way, mingled with fear and adreneline. She was escaping something, something powerful and oppressive, but in a very real, physical way. Danger. Life-threatening. And she wasn't by herself, that usual oppressive alone-ness that usually filled her dreams like it's own presence absent, replaced with other people. Did she know them? Who were they? She felt she knew, but she didn't. The only thing she felt she really knew was that if she didn't move, she..they... wouldn't make it, so she moved, she had no choice.

But she was also distinctly not herself, and she didn't know who she was, there were bigger things on her mind, until she caught a sight of her fleeing figure reflected in the smooth, slick surface of her futuristic, sci-fi surroundings, and she realized...

...she was Sabine.

It was enough to jolt her out of sleep with a gasp, feeling the racing adreneline of the scene in her chest, her heart beating like a bird furiously trying to escape her ribcage. She was sweating, it was hard to breathe, but she tried to slow it down, tried to calm down, tried to listen instead to the breathing on the other side of the room.

Then, as she attempt to process what had happened in her head, she leaned over to click on the lamp on her bedside table, peering into the shadows of the rest of the room as she said, in a loud sort of whisper, "Sabine? Are you there?"

Not are you up, because even if her dreams had been someone else's, that cold grip of abandonment was still clinging onto her like it was a second skin just then, cutting through even everything she'd just gone through in the nightmare.

Please, god, be there...

[[ for the roommate! And a big fat probable Content Warning, because a lot of Astrid's trauma deals with death, suicide, and abusive parenting ]]

Comments

[white_oleander]

"Not really," Astrid admitted.

But, a moment later, she said, "Unless...do you think it might help? Or only make it worse?"

Then, another moment later, after considering some of the more confusing dreams she'd had, and now realizing that there might have been some odd bleed between Sabine's and her own, she had to ask, "Do you know anyone named Annie?"

Maybe she'd been one of the people her dream-Sabine-self had been with in the escape, even if that didn't make a lot of sense, since she vividly remembered snippets of conversation that didn't fit that context at all. Make tinkle for Annie, like a child being potty-trained.

[seriesofbaddecisions]

Sabine was not one to ever try talking things out, so she was maybe not the person to ask.

But she could say, "No. Who's Annie?"

[white_oleander]

"I don't know," Astrid was frowning now toward the ceiling, before her eyes shifted to the wall, the shadowy shapes of everyone on her mural. "But she was un my dreams, too. Maybe I'm picking up someone else's, too..."

But whose? And, more importantly, why?

[seriesofbaddecisions]

"I'm going to find out what's causing this and I'm going to blow it up."

She was serious.

[white_oleander]

Astrid was quiet for a long moment again.

"What if what's causing it is just in my head?" she asked.

Although she was starting to feel that maybe just blowing up her head wasn't such a terrible idea. If anyone was going to do it, she would want it to be Sabine, too, because Sabine could at least make it artful.

[seriesofbaddecisions]

"Why would what's causing it be in your head?" Sabine wondered.

[white_oleander]

"Why wouldn't it?" Astrid asked. "Are you having other people's memories right now?"

[seriesofbaddecisions]

"I don't think so." She wasn't going to say it, but seeing someone else's might be a decent distraction from her own brain, at least. "But why would you see mine, unless it's a Fandom thing?"

[white_oleander]

"It might be a Fandom thing that's messing with my head, I mean," Astrid said softly. "Maybe something got in there, like...memory worms, or something."

Sorry, Sabine, this whole.thing was definitely igniting the gloomy and macabre side of your roommate.

[seriesofbaddecisions]

"Then at least it's probably all of us," Sabine said wryly.