smash_logs | I'll have a cup of tea and tell you of my dreaming

I'll have a cup of tea and tell you of my dreaming

Who: Everyone
What: DREAMS
When: A whole 24 hours spanning from September 14th-15th
Warnings: Creepy nightmares? Innuendo? I don't know, the usual.

There had been so much buzz about those stupid lollipops for weeks now. Not only out loud, but in her head - thoughts ranging from what's the deal with those things? to gotta have more to pricy as fuck. Eventually, she confused the cravings of others for her own, and it just so happened that her very own roommate had a box right on her side of the room!

Casey wasn't supposed to touch it, but she didn't see why. Money issues, or something. She didn't get the big deal about money either. She wasn't a Meowth, so there was no reason for her to have any. Therefore, the rules about it didn't apply to her.

That was her logic, anyway.

When Ai was asleep, she opened up the box and put her telekinesis to good use. Five of the candies lifted into the air - two green, three yellow - and the wrappers tore off in perfect synchronization. Too bad nobody was watching. The Abra opened her mouth wide and crammed all of them in at once, because she had no concept of savouring anything.

Shortly after, she fell asleep, the sticks still poking out of her mouth. That had to be bad for her teeth.

Soon the dreaming began...

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As brief and uninformitive as the answer was, it strangely spoke far more than a lengthier explanation could have. There was a faint spark of realization in Bulba's eyes as the other tugged him along. He followed, casting one last glance at the fallen flowers in the snow.

Bulba did not like this dream and he did not want to see what was at the top of this tower.

He did not want to see this garden.

While he was wishing all the noise would stop and the blood would halt and that Vinnie would realize this was a dream, he followed close behind. It was like Vinnie said. They couldn't stop there. He had to see this through too.

Edited 2012-09-25 23:46 (UTC)

Vinnie forced his eyes forward, trying not to remember the nauseous twist that the flowers evoked in him. They felt like waking, like a sliver of his rational, conscious mind, and it wasn't yet time for that. His subconscious knew better - it accepted everything in the logic of this world, because the world was an extension of itself. He was creating the path he followed. He would climb it to its destination, and discover what he knew would be waiting.

A place grafted together by memory, instinct and emotion wasn't always going to be kind, but it could never lie like the awakened mind could. The Garden was the end to this dream, and an end to many things. It was a beginning. Once he found the ending, everything would be all right.

At one point, the snows calmed and gave way to what looked like thick, cold mist, flooding into the tower's spire and obscuring their vision. They were out of the weather's reach now, ascending through the cloud layer itself. The pagoda's groans, however, did not stop - with the fog these voices simply began to speak with greater clarity. It was chanting, not unlike what could be heard by the Channelers of the Pokemon Tower, but deeper, richer. A tenor that shook one's bones.

"I wish you could be happy there," Vinnie thought out loud, a melancholy longing in his voice for his wild home. "I know you can't help going back to a human, same way I won't be able to help leaving them all. Still..."

Edited 2012-09-26 01:16 (UTC)

His ears pricked at the words. The chanting that surrounded them was felt. It shook and it trembled in him, but Bulba did not really hear them. All he heard were the words tumbling from Vinnie's mouth. Bulba was held in rapt attention. This might have been it, he suddenly felt. The detail he was missing, the thing that had been eluding him. Had it been tucked away in those memories of a jungle shop?

It felt so complicatedly simple. He'd understood it once, as a Bulbasaur. Came close to understanding it again when he returned that way. Growing up clouded things that should have just been known.

"I want to be," Bulba said without a lot of thought. His mouth was just moving, filled with all the things he'd never admit in a waking world, and his voice held notes of pleading. "I want to know what it's like to be like you." Everything Bulba did know he had clumsily found out on his own. A connection was missing and he didn't know how to ask for it. He wasn't sure where he was supposed to look for it.

"I don't know how. I don't know what I'm missing. Green is all I know and I don't know what to do."

"But you do," insisted Vinnie. "You know exactly what to do." Every Saur did, after all. They simply had to realize this innate knowledge - their calling - and it would give them the strength of will to fully bloom. It was telling enough that Bulba had grown strong enough to evolve without a ceremony. The only thing really standing in his way of going that final step was his own self-doubt. He needed that moment of clarity. It was, after all, obvious to everyone around him that he was more than ready to become a Venusaur himself.

"Green is to you what my Garden is to me - you're not missin' anything, you just ended up putting it somewhere different." Red, noticeably, was not mentioned in the equation at all. A small sigh left Vinnie as he unconsciously began to squeeze the other Grass Type's hand a little tighter. "If you wanted t'feel what I do, that'd be cuttin' apart too much of yourself. I'm not anyone you should try t'be, Bulba. You'd have to throw too much away."

Like a dissipating illusion, Vinnie's body shifted back (or forward?) into his taller, older form. The transition was barely noticeable - after all, even if his appearance changed, he remained himself - and it could have easily been that he was a Venusaur the entire time.

In a place where nothing made a lot of sense and everything was dictated by someone else's will, things strangely seemed that much clearer. Perhaps it was just because even here, the Bulba that was holding on to Vinnie's hand was simply part of the Ivysaur's subconscious. A dream within a dream. And sometimes it was in dreams that people found the answers they didn't know where to find otherwise.

Maybe things didn't have to be so complicated. Maybe they were as simple as they could have been before. Maybe...

The subtle change in pressure was met with a steady, equal squeeze in turn. He hung behind a step for a bit more, studying the expanse of the Venusaur's back. He could not see the flower there (which was possibly for the best at this point, knowing what the rest of him looked like at the moment), but he could remember the shapes of the blossoms on his back. It felt like all the answers were right there.

Though he had to guess that he was carrying them on his own back as well. Somewhere deep down. Tucked away in a whisper of a seed. It just had to try again.

But something had gone unsaid. The dream within the dream saw it with a remarkable amount of clarity. Though perhaps it was just very obvious. It wasn't like it had never been mentioned before, either here or in the waking world. Worries of where his heart could truly lay. Bulba pressed forward to be at Vinnie's side, keeping his eyes ahead of him on the mist and cloud for the moment.

His fingers looped through the other's and he spoke softly, "Trying to hold a Garden like you do... It'd be the same as you being with Red."

"Then you'll just end up breaking your heart eventually."

The faint scent of a sea breeze was carried through the mist, making it so much more like the fog that blew lightly across the ocean's shore at dawn. Though the two continued to climb, the wooden stairs were melting away into rock and soil, forming a mountain trail for them to follow. Vinnie closed his eyes, even as he walked. The memories were so deeply etched in his heart that it felt like he could find his way home blindfolded.

"It starts as a debt," Vinnie continued, "that turns into somethin' else. You feel like y'owe it to someone... or maybe to yourself, t'find that thing you're missing that'll make you strong."

But as ever, strong was subjective. There was a time when the then-Ivysaur only yearned for physical prowess, and then times when he ached to be emotionally invulnerable. Whatever it was he wanted to be, something had always been missing. Something he craved and strove for.

But it was always that desperate need that emptied him. For too long, Vinnie was so busy trying to fix each weakness, he couldn't see himself as a whole.

Acceptance of himself. Acceptance of the world. In the end, they were the hardest things to do.

The rhythmic chanting, it turned out, had only been the roar of the waves. A rustle of leaves, the perfume of rhododendrons against cedar. In the darkness, the Venusaur could still make shape of everything around him - he shaped it, in fact, filling in the gaps of the fog with his mind.

Once his feet felt the touch of grass, he stopped. He opened his eyes. All the pieces were back in place.

His Garden. The very heart of the place, teeming with vibrant green even in the depths of winter. A sprinkling of frost shimmered in the light like a diamond sheen, but held no real threat - there was a radiant glow here that emanated out from beneath the ground, a verdant energy that chased away the cold.

Yet somehow, the comforting warmth of his home didn't restore Vinnie at all. If anything, he sounded more weary. Drained.

Drip, drip, drip...

"It's the wrong idea. You end up chasing a dream, an' all dreams have t'end."

The memories of cold had been chased away, leaving only a blanket memory of warmth around him. It was lovely up there. The depths of the green seemed almost unreal. It was teeming with life and it seemed even more so after such a long and chilly climb. This was the place Vinnie wanted to show him. The place that he hadn't been able to show Bulba before. Bulba took in a deep breath, tasting the sweetness of the air on the tip of his tongue.

This was the place where they should have been able to be happier. He could feel the pulse beneath his feet and the warm glow of light on his face, but nothing was shaking that cold that was churning in his gut as Vinnie spoke.

He did not want to be here.

Bulba glance down at their hands at first. Flowers were springing up all around the Venusaur's feet. Red dripped down off their petals, delaying the sprouting of some and just making others all the more radiant. It made a small lurch of dread in Bulba's stomach. He moved a step closer, looking back up at the Venusaur's face.

All dreams have t'end.

"...Vinnie..?"

There was a very tired smile on the Venusaur's face as he exhaled right then. That rush of air was the sound of the world being lifted off his shoulders finally, and a visible shudder seemed to accompany it. An unburdening... peace, at last. But there was an unmistakable finality in it as well. His eyelids drooped, too heavy and clotted with blood to hold themselves aloft, and it was clear that his eyes had become too clouded with red to see Bulba any longer.

All of a sudden, he collapsed forward and fell too his knees, with his legs literally crumbling beneath him. The flowers, apparently too impatient to wait for his body to bleed out, had begun to violently sprout from beneath the skin. From what was visible beneath his clothes, tendrils and sprouts were breaking through the Venusaur's flesh, blooming as easily as they would have in soil. Each wound began to team with flora, so much so that it looked as though he had simply been bleeding petals instead of fluid.

The pool of overgrowth at his feet exploded in new vigour as he hit the ground, with blossoms of bright crimson erupting out all around him, each one out-doing the next. Cascades of colour swept across the Garden in celebration of beauty.

The earth was welcoming him back, both body and soul. That was what made the flora here so alive - the energy of life itself, departed from its mortal coil.

Vinnie was dying, and he was smiling as he did so. Weakly, he began to teeter forward in what felt like slow motion, succumbing to the overgrowth completely.

"There... I told you I'd be al'right."

It was mortifyingly lovely. He felt ten shades of horrified and yet it was beautiful and he couldn't take his eyes away. Bulba sank with the Venusaur, completely captivated. A scream was building in his chest, full of denials and pleads. This wasn't all right. This was far from all right. It wasn't that he didn't understand it. He didn't want to understand it.

Because he knew. There was an inherent knowledge that was speaking softly from inside, steadying his shouts with a calm refrain. This was how life continued. This was how things were supposed to be.

But knowing wouldn't stop his heart from aching.

He reached out to Vinnie's shoulders to keep him still. The Grass Type could feel the soft, red flowers blossoming between his fingers and he thought he could hear their sudden bursts of song. Each one filled the ache and he wished he could cry.

His eyes were dry as he carefully lifted his hands. That calm hum kept the trembling from his fingers as he moved them tenderly over the contours of Vinnie's face. It was one he wanted to remember. One without the blood, with everything where it should have been.

"Please," he found himself whispering, his hands falling to hold what was left of him. He didn't know how to finish the plea. There were too many things he wanted to ask of the dying Venusaur. Please don't go. Wait. Tell him what to do. He didn't want to be the only one again. He didn't want him to go.

Please be happy.

Not knowing how else to express it, the younger saur leaned in and gently claimed him in a kiss. One act of intimacy to make up for the lack of another. He would have liked to have spoken to the heart of him one more time. He wasn't sure if Vinnie's flower would have heard him if he tried. Bulba was fairly certain it was its voice he thought he heard in the chorus erupting across the glade.

It sounded so nice.

"I'll miss you."

There was too much blood in his mouth for Vinnie to taste anything other than bitter sap, but he could still feel the soft touch of lips against his own as his consciousness trickled away. If they had been awake, it would've simply been a kiss - but like this, as two unfettered psyches, he could feel the whisper of Bulba's light through a tender touch. It lit the darkness of the path he travelled, out of his body and into the earth.

No breath left him their faces parted, and his head drooped forward limply, devoid of life. The sounds that came out of him was no longer that of a person, more like the soft creaking of an old tree being overtaken by vines. What was left of his skin hardened, crumbling, until what was left could no longer be considered a person's form - nature had taken him back completely.

The Garden shuddered. The edges of reality peeled away slowly, with the small details fading first into forgetfulness. Everything not at the forefront of Bulba's attention was a soft blur, a memory waiting to be lost.

Vinnie - the real Vinnie - was waking up.

As the world dissolved, a voice murmured out from the glow of the earth - a mixture of the Venusaur's conscious mind returning to him, and the soul of his flower's honest, bright song.

Ha, that's the first time you've actually said so.

And the dream was over.

Bulba tumbled with the fading Garden into the void. Left with the memory of flowers and no way back to his own dreaming, there was only one place for him to go.

The Ivysaur lurched up from the grass with a gasp. His site was blurred and he spent a moment trying to orient himself. The school garden slowly came to recognition as he blinked, rubbing his lips. He was remembering a weird taste, bitter and metallic, and the blurriness just wasn't fading. He reached up and wiped his eyes. Tears covered his hands, and Bulba stared down at them in dazed confusion.

For a moment he couldn't recall why he was crying. He was sure his eyes had been dry the whole time Vinnie had...

Vinnie.

The Ivysaur was on his feet without another thought, the clarity of things remembered sending him chasing after scents in the air.

Meanwhile

Vinnie didn't remember shit.

He lumbered back into the waking world with a small headache and an already fading sensation of... something he couldn't quite place. The images in his mind might have well have been sculpted out of smoke. Whatever it was, it was gone now, and the Venusaur was feeling no real loss from forgetting.

But shit, his legs were still sound asleep. They were well and truly stuck in that cross legged position he was sitting in, and wow, they stung. Everything from the knees down was tingly and numb. Now that he didn't have any kimono-clad girls poking him every time he started dozing off, trying to meditate was a lot harder.

Actually, being poked while trying to meditate didn't make things easier either. How anyone managed this without either getting distracted or falling asleep was beyond him. He had thought that picking out this specific spot in the woods would make things easier - maybe awaken something significant - but apparently the soft grass only contributed to an unplanned nap.

With a grunt, Vinnie had to manually pull his legs apart and place his feet on the ground - but even that made him wince. Trying to stand was not going to be fun. He'd just wait for a bit while his circulation returned, maybe. What a pain.

Edited 2012-09-30 07:25 (UTC)

It was terribly unfortunate that Vinnie wasn't the complete master of his motor controls. It kind of made him a sitting duck in the event of people bursting out of the bushes to tackle him. Gosh it sure would suck if that kind of thing was something that happened very often.

. . . It might not have happened often, but it was definitely happening now.

One moment Vinnie had been recovering on his own on the soft grass. The next was a confusing rush of motion that somehow ended with one (1) Bulba attached to Vinnie's middle in a fierce hug.

Good morning, Vinnie. You were apparently a saur magnet.

It would, in fact, suck heartily. Bulba nearly knocked him over - not that he needed to go that far to cause severe discomfort. Oh god the slightest movement to his legs was awful tingly pain, no no no.

"Hyghaurghhfuck--!" he said, eloquently and definitely not kind of yelping a bit.

That was more not-yelling than there should have been.

Bulba immediately sat back on his knees between Vinnie's legs for the moment, his ears completely flat against his head as he stared at Vinnie in alarm. Oh god now what.

"Sorry! I'm sorry. Are you okay? I'm sorry!"

And yet it looked like he was about to start hugging him again any second now.

"MY LEGS ARE ASLEEP my legs are asleep motherfuckkk..."

Well, that... certainly didn't sound like anything deathly. Give him a moment to compose himself.

Vinnie grit his teeth, trying to steel himself while he realized how mildly embarrassing this was right now. A lot of man points were being deducted right now for the incredible wussitude of this moment.

Actually, now that he thought about it, what was going on? Did he do something? Hugs why? So dumbfounded.

"Uh. What's this about...?"

Oh. OH. Oops. That would explain why Vinnie was just sort of sitting around looking vaguely uncomfortable.

Bulba nervously fiddled with his hands in his lap. "Um." There was a searching look now, and Bulba only looked a teeny tiny bit guilty. "You don't remember...?"

Very quickly, Vinnie had to reassure himself that no, Bulba couldn't have found out about Char's garden, that was definitely not what this was about. Wasn't even his birthday yet, and he looked way too sad for some reason. Did something sad happen recently? Well, other than feeling a bit bummed that Red wasn't here, but that wasn't all that recent anymore.

Well, he was already out of ideas, then. The Venusaur squinted back, definitely too bewildered to be hiding anything.

"Remember... what?"

That was definitely not the face of someone that had any idea what he was talking about. This was kind of awkward suddenly. "Er..."

"You were just asleep, right? Things were..." He paused, looking for a way to say it. Fuzzy memories of other dreams shifed through his thoughts as he considered it. How had they put it?

Knowing to take careful precautions this time around, the younger saur reattached himself to the older one while he was still mostly immobile. "I'm sorry. I think dreams were intersecting or something... You invited me into yours."

Vinnie continued looking dubious as he was re-hugged. He didn't exactly have a problem with giving hugs when needed, but a better explanation of the context would've been nice. The words coming out of Bulba's mouth made no sense to him. "You sure you didn't just dream all that on your own?" he suggested skeptically.

Then again, how did Bulba know that he had just been sleeping? The Venusaur furrowed his brows. Hm.

"We started in mine," Bulba said quietly. "I guess you thought it was yours since it was, uh... well it was the Garden. You let me in but I think that's when it became your dream since everything was really snowy and you were leading me up this tall tower."

He shivered briefly at the phantom memory of the cold. Bulba glanced up at him, biting his lip. "You were an Ivysaur most of the time and... and..."

Nope, his face was back in Vinnie's shirt.

Wha-- oh, okay. Vinnie stared down at this Ivysaur that seemed to be trying to fuse with his chest, still confused. Awkwardly, he gave the younger Saur a pat on the back, but it was hard to be comforting when he wasn't sure exactly what he was trying to console.

Snow was a reoccurring theme in his dreams, along with Sprout Tower on the occasion - the fact that Bulba somehow knew this felt a bit too uncanny for the Venusaur to write it off completely as pure imagination. It didn't change the fact that he was clueless to what happened next, though.

"Wait, you have dreams about the Garden?"

No, that wasn't what you were supposed to take away from this, Vinnie.

Edited 2012-09-30 09:17 (UTC)

Ugh. UGH. Vinnie why didn't you remember, it would have saved you both a lot of trouble. Bulba didn't particularly want to talk about his own dreams, but if Vinnie asked questions it seemed only fair at this point to begrudgingly give him answers about them.

There was a small nod against the Venusaur's chest, and Bulba turned his head slightly so that even if he was still looking down his answers wouldn't be lost into the pink walls of Vinnie's shirt.

"... Sometimes. Usually I can't get in it though. There's a big... invisible wall? I guess. Probably cause you're not there. This time you showed up though, and you took me with you but..."

Bulba stop trailing off that's annoying.

Vinnie quietly processed this. He wasn't an expert on symbology or dreams, but the fact that Bulba had an invisible wall in his subconscious was rather telling. In his head, the Garden was somewhere he wasn't allowed to go, at least without Vinnie.

The Venusaur's expression may have softened sadly. A dream was just a dream, but it that didn't change the feelings that were seeded in the mind any less real. Even if the Ivysaur didn't sound keen on describing it in depth, this was what Bulba lived with in his mind. This was a thought he held onto tightly enough to live in at night.

Vinnie put his arms around the other's shoulders, letting them rest there in a loose hug. There was an ending to this story, one that Bulba had trouble forcing out of his mouth, and it was only right that the Venusaur listened to it with the weight it deserved.

"Okay. So this was Sprout Tower, right? What happened there?"

"Mm, maybe? Probably. There was a lot of sounds that kind of sounding like chanting. It was hard to tell. You kept leading me up, because you were going to show me part of the Garden you didn't show me last time."

Bulba shut his eyes, taking in the feeling of Vinnie's arms around his shoulders and the sound of his heart beating beneath his ear. This was all the warmth of someone that was very much alive. Bulba chewed up his lip.

"You looked awful, even when we were in my dream. Just... you were a wreck. You didn't really seem to care but you just kept... there was so much blood. You were covering the stairs in flowers. We talked. You wouldn't stop climbing or bleeding."

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