so she walks and when her legs can no longer support her weight and she falls, she crawls. and when she can no longer move, her body growing sluggish, her vision blurring grey, jisoo prays.
“please,” the World shimmers, flickers in and out of existence; its Barrier appearing and disappearing, mocking her with open doors and plausible escape routes. she knows she’s doomed to fail, doomed to die in Dreamscape before she can fully awaken in the prison they call her home, but still she reaches once more, fingers trembling as she reaches across the Divide, trailing blood across the Barrier. drawing a shuddering breath, jisoo begins to write as her eyes flutter closed as she attempts to find the Catalyst–the Thing from Before, the Someone.
He falls ill. It's really all in his head, but psychology is a fickle thing and she's eating away from inside his own mind. The mind consumes his body, and soon he's got strange seizures, heat strokes and a terrible distaste for noise.
The doctor comes by and assesses him of stress; he lets a lie tumble from his lips, although he's never known them before. (Classes have been difficult, for once. Making friends is hard. My Philosophy 302 professor gives me a rough time.) He blinks a few times, tilts his head, and the poor doc believes him. He leaves his dormitory murmuring about how his physiology and anatomy don't seem to make sense.
"Nothing makes sense when you're eighteen going on nineteen, doc." He murmurs under his breath, only to be overcome with another fever an hour later.
He learns that his mind is only just another engine: evolution was its engineer, and as natural selection works, it lags too slow behind the times. His mind has machinery that he's never put to use, and the sudden work up has heated up his own system.
He's only been trying to organize the story unveiling in his head. What he had learned in Intro to Fiction was finally being put to use: he was seeing facts and pieces about the work, and his job was to fit them together, then step back to analyze. This was rather difficult and definitely not of his suit -- his friends were numbers, systems and logic -- not words, paragraphs and imagination. But he lays his head and all he can hear is her calling.
((Who, me?)) ((Why, me?)) ((Who am I to help you?)) ((Who are you?))
"That's a rhetorical question." He's dreaming again, and the fact that he vividly knows he's in a dreamscape is rather -- cool. "I know who you are." He speaks to no one but the walls of the small living room he's constructed. He's learned how to be his own architect, learned how to somewhat, halfway, get certain things he wants. What pleases him the most is how he's learned to organize the sudden rush of information on his protagonist (--antagonist?) -- he's brought information back into something so familiar to him. Each piece of information is a thread, a string. In his hands, he holds a needle, and as he walks around the room, sometimes, he'll find this to fit that. And he'll knit them together. Maybe he'll knit a story half decent.
"I know who you are." He's threading together another line, but this time, the string falls through a hole, as if too loose. This is how he knows this isn't right -- and frustration follows. "I just don't know how to meet you again."
The room falls. He even curses, because he's so sick of this plot. The knits all bleed through the spaces of his fingers, and he's left alone. A door stands ahead of him, and déjà vu comes to stand behind him. He feels trapped. Lost. Still the terrified child with only his toes kissing the water. But these waves bring in the calls again -- the wails and cries.
So he finds a speck of sand to help him, help him find courage.
The door opens, turns once again into ash. Nothing separates them but a thin film of glimmer, and he stares upon her again.
