dreams 101
AVON
In Avon's dreams, they were alive again but they - and he - knew they would die.
They were on the Liberator again, a smaller, shabbier, dirtier Liberator, deserted and decaying like the Hommik villages near Xenon base, with the flight deck couches oddly shaped, blood-red and stained, the work stations too-small or too-large, and a dark, colourless space where the fascia ought to be. Gan, Cally, Blake... and him.
Gan, his face battered and his small eyes as dark and empty as the caves below the Xenon base, but still smiling, still reasonable, still insisting that he would follow. It felt vaguely unfair to be so irritated by someone who had - who would - die - somewhere, he didn't know where - somewhere underground. It felt vaguely terrifying to be talking to Gan about it.
But only vaguely.
Cally, walking in a strange, twisted way as if broken inside, her mouth set rigid and the thoughts she sent at him as harsh and cutting as the bleak Xenon winds. He couldn't recall how she would die, though he knew it would happen, and all too soon. In his dreams, she didn't seem to care, but then in his dreams, she wasn't dead.
Yet.
Blake... it hurt, when Blake said he would die on Jevron, alone. As pale and drawn and hollow-eyed as he had been that last day, a tattered, dirty bandage still wrapped round his shoulder, Blake talked softly, his voice thin and whispering, like the strange, choking cry of the alien birds they killed each autumn. Talked of broken thoughts and memories, of people he didn't recall and Avon didn't know, of nightmares dreamed within the nightmare lived on Jevron, after they had lost him. Blake wouldn't tell him how he had died - would die. Maybe Blake didn't know. It hurt, because Avon needed to know. It hurt, as nothing else ever did and ever would.
If they'd tell him, he thought in the dreams, he could stop it happening. If he didn't wake, they might tell him how.
~oOo~