trans_9 | Dollhouse [Closed to Aang]

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Dollhouse [Closed to Aang]

Asuka dreamed again. The Nightmare King aside, she has disturbing, surrealistic dreams and nightmares on her own. Usually they weren't that bad and only half-remembered the following morning. She can typically remember her mother. It's not something she talks about with anyone ever. However, tonight was different. Tonight was horrifically, terribly visceral and real to her. It was almost as if she was standing in that corridor again, staring at the door (except she's not a child anymore, but her grown self).

She didn't want to turn the knob. She didn't want to go inside that room. She knew what was beyond it, what lay in wait for her. Her mother was dead. Her mother had hung herself and hung her. Asuka. The doll her mother had treated like her daughter instead of the flesh and blood being. Her hand rose of its own accord - despite her silent screams and the will she threw behind the gesture, despite the rising horror and dread. She turned the door knob and the door flew open, sending a long rectangle of light into the darkened room beyond.

She choked back a sob and slid back against the corridor wall, siding down until she was huddled against the floor, staring. She was reliving it all over again. Her mother's corpse hanging from the ceiling. As if that weren't bad enough the doll - that horrible, wretched doll, with it's yarn hair and button eyes slowly swung around, almost like it had a mind of it's own, and seemed to stare at her.

Die with me.

A whispered voice on the edge of her hearing.

"No! I don't- I want to live...!"

Her voice was a thin, reedy wail as she began to claw at the wall behind her, searching for a way out of this nightmare. The doll twitched. Then again as the rope holding it snapped and it dropped to the floor to lie in a little heap.

She was trying not to scream again as she half-crawled away from the doorway. Not again. Not again.

It was following her. The doll was following her. Dragging itself along on it's arms, scuttling impossibly fast after her. This wasn't happening. It couldn't be happening.

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It scuttles along, little button eyes glimmering in the light almost like they're alive. As Asuka goes around a corner, she'll find herself in a dead end.

This is, quite literally, one of her worst nightmares. She slams a fist ineffectually against the wall and glances over her shoulder, starting to sob. She hates dolls. But she also fears them. She tries to put on her usual bravado, snarling, "Stay away from me!"

There is a burst of flame that comes from further down the hall. She can't see the source. The doll bursts into flames, however. Its hair curls up and the ends glow orange as it burns.

...And yet, it still keeps crawling towards her, button eyes blackening and starting to melt.

Asuka starts to laugh when it bursts into flame, a high-pitched desperate sound that dies in her throat as it keeps coming towards her. She huddles back into the corner, trying to get as far away as she can. She covers her head with her arms, screaming, "No, no, no, no! I'm not a doll! I'm not a doll!"

There is a thunk, and...the doll doesn't come. No matter how long she waits, it never reaches her.

Sobbing, she looks up through her tears, still terrified. She half-expects to see it looming in front of her. She wants this to end. She wants to wake up in Tokyo-3 or even on the Meatship.

"It's okay," says the gentle voice of a young man. "I won't let it hurt you."

When she looks up, she'll see a teenage boy, a few years older than her, standing there. He wears the saffron robes of a monk, and there's a wooden staff in his hand that's currently pinning the burning doll to the floor. The flames lick at the edges of it, but the doll burns to ash before it catches, and a gesture of his hand causes a breeze to come that puts the fire out and scatters the ashes.

She stares up at him for a moment, dumbfounded. Who is he? Why is he helping her? She slowly clambers to her feet, heart racing. Fear is still rolling off of her in waves. She stares at the ground where the doll was a moment ago and shudders, then looks at the young man.

She doesn't know what to say. She's starting to come back to herself. She scrubs furiously at her eyes and face, scowling as she mumbles through the tears.

"...I... could've handled that..."

"I know," the boy says, and there's not even a bit of condescension in his voice. "I just like helping people anyway."

There is the sound of something falling to the floor in the room around the corner that the doll came from--something heavier than a doll. Aang peeks around the corner and his eyes goes wide and then he runs over to Asuka.

"We have to go now, and I need your help to get us out of here. Can you help me?"

Asuka opens her mouth, then snaps it shut. She actually doesn't have a retort on hand for that, especially since she's still trying to recover. She sniffles again, trying not to let her distress bleed through anymore then it has to. She watches him and when she hears the thump her eyes go wide for a moment in realization. Oh God. No. Her mother wouldn't hurt her.

She nods as his question brings her back and she tries to get herself back in the zone, "Of course! I'm Asuka Langley Soryu!"

"This is like a place you knew, right?" Aang asks her. "Can you try to get a better picture of it in your head? You need to make it more real, more a solid place. Because if it's a solid place, it's a solid place we can get away from. I can't do that, because I've never seen it."

He pauses. "And if you can imagine a window, that'd be great, too."

They can hear something dragging around the corner, dragging itself on the floor...

"Well... Sort of. I haven't been here since I was five!"

She swallows and glances down the corridor, then back to the wall. She hisses softly through clenched teeth and tries to imagine a door or a window or an opening or something in the wall. She really doesn't like the idea of meeting the corpse of her head mother trying to strangle her to death.

The strange shifty nowherespace of the dream takes a more solid shape--and there's a window.

That Aang breaks with a gust of air.

"This works! C'mon!"

Grabbing her by the hand, he drags her over to the window, sticking his head out to peer up at the roof. Hmm. It's sort of stretching up impossibly into the sky--this entire place is still a little distorted. The drop is also pretty impossible, too--they can't even see the ground.

That's okay, though. It'd taken him some time to find him among the sleepers, but he'd been there, dreaming his dreams about the sky.

Aang has a friend. He takes out a strange whistle and blows it. It has no sound.

Rustle rustle goes the thing sliding across the floor, almost to the hallway they're in. Rustle rustle rustle...

She glances outside - this place is strange. Then again, it's a dream. She closes her eyes and tries to ward off the rising fear. That thing can't be her mother. That thing isn't. Her imagination is already conjuring up horrendous images of the corpse of her mother, her neck at an unnatural angle, trying to throttle her to death.

The kid gets a weird look and her voice carries a strident note of desperation, "What the Hell is that supposed to do? Come on! Get me out of here!"

"Just give him a second."

Not so far off, in the mist, there's a sound that sort of sounds like:

Rustle rustle, and there's a hand that reaches around the corner...

"Okay, we can go now."

And that's when the crazy monk toss his staff out the window, bodily lifts her up in his arms and jumps out after it, sending them into freefall.

Edited 2010-01-31 12:11 (UTC)

Asuka is too busy watching the hand creep around the corner, eyes going wide, to notice exactly what Aang is about to do until it's far too late. She lets out an unholy shriek of terror as she's pulled into freefall, limbs flailing. There's no ground!

Who needs ground when you have bison?

Aang's staff lands in Appa's basket and then a moment later Asuka and Aang land in another part of the flying bison's basket. It's not the softest landing, but it could have been way worse.

"That was easier than I thought it would be," Aang remarks.

Asuka lands with a thud and then scrambles upright, staring. She's amazed and still a bit freaked out. She glances at Aang, mouth hanging open, "...is this a flying bison? Where did this- what?"

She flails helplessly for a moment, "What the Hell is going on?!"

"Hi!" says the monk, finally introducing himself now that she's safe. "I'm Aang."

"...I'm Asuka," is her response, "Asuka Langley Soryu."

She clings to the basket as she peeks over the edge, "...this is the weirdest dream ever."

"That's because Appa and I came into your dream," says the monk, reaching over the edge of the basket to pet the coarse fur of Appa's neck. "We wouldn't normally be here, but the Nightmare King is going into everyone's dreams to try to make them afraid, and we've been trying to stop him."

Well, Aang has been. Appa, he'd only found recently.

"...oh. Right."

She remembered hearing about the NIghtmare King from the crew, but she hadn't thought about that much - why would she? It's not really her problem to deal with. Let the magical sorcery people handle it. At least, that'd been her train of thought.

"...I wasn't that afraid!"

This from the girl who'd been curled up in a corner sobbing her eyes out. Anything to protect the ego.

"It's okay to be afraid. I get scared all the time."

Aang looks over at her, and leans back against the edge of the basket. The bison starts to fly through a field of clouds that look like mountains. The moon and stars peek out from in between, and make the dream-sky they're flying through look almost as bright as it is that moment right before dawn.

"You could have frozen instead of trying to help me get us out of there, but you didn't. What makes a person brave isn't that they get afraid--it's how they deal with it."

There's something incredibly gentle about the way he speaks, but if Asuka thinks there's any true meekness there (like someone else she knows), she'll be mistaken.

"I don't. I'm not afraid of anything. I don't need help. From anyone."

Asuka curled her legs against her chest, watching the clouds roll by beneath them. It's soothing in a way. She's never truly flown like this before, out in the open with nothing in between her and the air. She glanced away from Aang for a moment, voice bitter, "Great. That makes me feel so much better. Compliments from arrow-head."

"I'm glad it made you feel better," says Aang. "I like making other people happy."

Either sarcasm goes right over his head or he's just playing at obliviousness to defuse her persnickety-ness.

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