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| Cold Sweat; tag: Bills | |
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| Topic Started: Jul 17 2013, 01:58 AM (196 Views) | |
| Ted Kaplan-Altman | Jul 17 2013, 01:58 AM Post #1 |
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Mutant Skrull Physiology
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July 16, 2013 3:47 AM Bill & Ted's apartment ================ He is in Times Square, again. He is always in Times Square. Part of him will always be in Times Square. It is, in the immortal words of the Weather Girls, raining men. Tall, blond, dark and lean, rough and tough and strong and mean. But nobody is shouting hallelujah; the heavens will hear no praise this day. Not from his throat, anyway, and God will not hear any voice that praises this atrocity. The bodies that fall hit the sidewalk around him, bursting like giant water baloons, spraying blood and bits of meat and gristle in every direction. Each wet heavy THUD-SPLAT is another life extinguished, another life Ted is unable to save. It's raining men. Women, too... and boys and girls. The girl is caught, plucked from the air by metal tentacles, themselves drenched in blood, and for a moment he allows himself to believe she is saved. Only for a moment, though. Then the girl is dust, and the evil face is laughing, and he tries to save her but he cannot. And he pleads to take her place, but he cannot. And he prays to whatever gods grant vengeance to those of impure heart to grant it to him, to feel the Russian cyborg's armored body come apart under his hands, but they either do not listen or their answer is No. And in the shadows, a face appears: a white-skinned face he does not recognize. Ted recognized the dream; was intimately familiar with it. This had really happened, Spiral and Omega Red had really set off a Madbomb in the middle of Manhattan and the bloodbath that ensued had recurred in his nightmares again and again ever since. He'd seen a counselor, afterwards -- SHIELD protocol required it -- and had been told what he already knew: that emotional trauma took time to heal, and manifested itself in many different ways, and nightmares were common after events like that one. He just had to give it time. He is in Westchester. He is always in Westchester. Part of him will always be in Westchester. The Institute is collapsing around him. The posters on his wall tear, then the wall itself, and the roof above him. His bed trembles, and a shock-wave comes through the floor, ripping through him. He lives, though. His body, his borrowed body, sheathes itself in armor and muscle, protects him from the waves of stone and metal and dirt and fire and bone and blood, sees him safe to the surface, to the wholesome air that fifty of his classmates would never get to breathe again. And in the shadows, a face appears: white-skinned and black-haired, a woman's face. He just had to give it time. Ororo had told him the same thing when the Institute went down, after he'd dug himself out through the rubble, and afterwards, when he'd helped to dig through the rubble to sort out the broken bits of building from the broken bits of those who had lived there. He is in southern Nevada, at the Air Force installation known colloquially as Area 51. The building is collapsing around him, but at his own hands. The bodies pile up like cordwood, each with a neat bullet-hole between the eyes. There is very little blood, and the eyes do not close. They look at him as he tears the building down with his own hands, green hands, armored hands. And in the shadows, a white-skinned, black-haired woman with eyes like Death. They always said the same thing. Give it time. Always. And it was true, after a fashion; by the time he'd left the Savage Land he'd been sleeping through the night again, almost as though the Institute explosion had never happened. He didn't wake up reaching for the girl in Omega Red's tentacles anymore. And he'd hardly lost even a night's sleep over the bodies at Area 51. He is in Times Square, and the bodies fall from the windows of buildings that reach for the clouds but can never rise above the bloody ground. He is in Westchester, and the bodies are crushed by rubble and charred by flame. He is in Nevada, and the bodies are stacked like sandbags before a hurricane. And every body has a face, and every face looks at him with eyes like Death. They reach for him. "You do not belong," they tell him, and he knows they are right. "Your true people are gone, and the Hell they left behind waits for you." And then they are gone, and Ted is alone in the mists of Skrullos, and -- --the cry that burst out of Ted's throat as he awoke could not properly be described as a word, at least not in any language his waking mind understood. It was a howl, really, more bestial than human, and it changed in pitch as his body quadrupled in mass and his chest doubled in volume, like the sound of a train speeding past the listener. He sat up, unsure where he was for a moment, then reached out for Billy's arm, for reassurance, for comfort.Billy was awake as well, and Ted smiled as best he could. "Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you up." But it didn't take much to realize that he wasn't the only one plagued by nightmares tonight, and after a long breath he decided that going back to sleep was just not going to happen. "I'm thinking pancakes. Or maybe waffles... did we ever unpack the waffle iron your mom got you?" |
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| Wiccan | Jul 24 2013, 09:36 PM Post #2 |
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Reality Warping/ Nice Pashmina
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Lightning cracked across the sky. Rapidly followed by the war drums of thunder. This was a scene that Billy was intimately familiar with as the he looked up at the dark sky. This was his home. The home he had, had to leave as a baby. Not the home he grew up in, but the home he was born in. The former utopian home his mother had created to hide away from the world when she felt pain. He couldn't look at what came next, he hated seeing it the first time. The pain in his mother, the fact that both himself and Tommy were too young to understand what was going on as the female reality warper - their mommy as she would have been at this stage sent them backwards in time and across the various universes so that they may survive and live a proper life. But this wasn't the waking world, it was Billy's nightmare. So he had to see it, as the world shifted to show the scene of Wanda saying good bye to her two sons as the House of M reality began to destroy itself. It was different this time though, there were no buildings, no white picket fence. Just the two boys and their mother surrounded by nothing but green. Another iridescent flash streaked across the sky followed by the low rumbling of thunder. The scarlet portal laid in front of the children now as the rain started to fall, but they were not going to get their freedom this time. Something, somewhere wanted to torment Billy as the portal shut itself. The rain continued and grew steadily in strength. Unlike the real world the water didn't appear to be sinking into the ground and as the strange time line of dreams went the water rapidly quickly began to rise around Billy's feet. Rising up his calves. He tried to move, he tried to speak. But nothing worked he was trapped where he was and the two small boys were no where to be seen as the water level rose above where they were. Soon enough Wanda had disappeared into the water too. But Billy wasn't alone in this dream, beneath the surface of the water like from the boggy scenes in Lord of the Rings he could see them. The faces that he knew all too well. Panic set into the reality warper as he tried to do anything to move but each thing he tried it failed and he was stuck. Those faces, tens of them, repeated over and over again in the water were each turning to look at their murderer trapped beneath the very same element that Billy had created that took their lives away. It was then that he felt the slimey hands wrap around his legs, one at a time climbing higher and higher. As those deathly fingers worked higher, Billy was jerked awake by the beastial howl and the sudden movement of Teddy's shifting moving him in their bed. His body was trembling, as those lifeless eyes haunted his mind still. He almost missed Teddy's apology. "s'okay." Billy spoke meekly as he tried to clear his mind, push those thoughts of that day and what he did back into box that those memories were stored in. It wasn't working and he needed to get up and do something. "Yeah they sound good. I think it's in the box in the living room still." His voice distracted as he pushed the covers back and climbed out of the bed. It was then as he was stood in their room that he realised that Teddy had moved him in their bed. It was then he looked back and saw the shapeshifted form of his boyfriend as Billy stood there in his plain blue pj shorts and tee. "Is everything ok? I don't think I've ever seen you shift in your sleep before." |
[align=center] [/align] Sig thanks to Trey! | |
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| Ted Kaplan-Altman | Jul 25 2013, 12:27 AM Post #3 |
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Mutant Skrull Physiology
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"Yeah, everything's fine," Ted replied, adopting a smile he didn't entirely feel to reassure his boyfriend. "Just some bad dreams." It was far from being the first time he'd had nightmares -- it was something to be expected given the kinds of situations he'd lived through. Not that he was anything special in that regard; lots of folks, both mutant and human, had been through worse. Admittedly, he wasn't quite either one, but that didn't really change anything. And admittedly, this one was more severe than usual... a lot more severe. Later, when he got into work and received the briefing about the nightmare plague that hit the world, that would make more sense, but right now he was just inclined to attribute it to the pizza they'd shared the night before having some bad sausage or something. "I don't think I've ever seen you shift in your sleep before." "Hm?" Ted looked down, noticing for the first time that he was in his giant form. "Oh. Huh... yeah, you're right," he acknowledged, sheepishly poking at the shreds of fabric. "Oops." He shifted back to what he still thought of as his "normal" form, pink-skinned and significantly smaller-framed (if admittedly still large as humans go), though he understood intellectually that it was no such thing. Still, it felt more natural, somehow, than his larger green-skinned body, let alone the other, more transient forms he adopted from time to time. More comfortable. "Actually, I used to Hulk out in my sleep all the time when I first came to Xavier's," he explained. His control had gotten a lot better since then, something he knew the other man had more than a little experience with. "Of course, I usually didn't have company in my bed then," he added with another grin, a more sincere one this time. Talking to Billy always made him feel better. Safer. "Ever, really. So I didn't wake anyone up back then." Ted rolled out of bed as they chatted; pulled on his uniform pants. "What about you? You look like you were having a pretty rough night yourself." |
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8:55 AM Jul 11