Who| Rich Rider and you
What| Open post and "Blargh Fhtagn" Part 1 threads
Where| Legion World
When| An IC Day after "Game of Throne"
Warnings/Notes| Attempted murder in some threads, some zombie imagery
The nightmares are getting worse. Oh sure, he'd had them now and again since finding himself in the Legion's universe. That's no surprise, after everything he's been through. The occasional nightmare is pretty much a given. But they started to get worse after that time travel mission and he doesn't know why. They all seem to involve the Cancerverse and he doesn't know why that is, either. Everything that's going on reminds him a lot more of the Annihilation War. The swarm tactics of the Catastrophists, having to engage in an orderly withdrawal from Apokolips. So why are his dreams filled with razor teeth, and tentacles, and too many eyes?
And hatred. Crushing hatred bearing down on him like a gravimetric field, pinning him, boring under his skin and filling him up. Sometimes he wakes up in the morning and it feels like something is crawling, squirming under his skin. It's definitely not something physical; he'd gotten scanned in Medbay after returning to Legion World after getting arrested and come up clean. So that means it has to be in his head, right? But that's something he can't accept.
(Sometimes people's faces change and for just a second, they're rotting, flesh hanging, sliding off...)The day that the Book of Magic messed up Legion World had by gone in a blur, and Rich has the vague sense that he's missing time somehow. He can't really remember what he got up to most of the day. So he starts to go about his day the day afterward and it... it feels strange.
It's the last day. And somehow he knows. He ignores it, because there's no reason to have a feeling of foreboding, so paying attention to it, treating it like his last day on Earth is stupid. Every time he even so much as thinks of telling someone else that he feels strange, that thought is silenced by some squirming thing inside him. So he just goes through his daily routine like it's some holy ritual, a last rite of normalcy, one last chance to have his last friendly conversations, smile his last smiles, and just
exist as the person he is right now.
( Read more... )