sixthiterationlogs | what does it mean when you drown in a dream

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what does it mean when you drown in a dream

WHO: Kate Kelly
WHERE: The Fountain
WHEN: 15th July
OPEN TO: OTA
WARNINGS: Potential panic attack
STATUS: Open

Kate wonders if her family has a touch of foresight. Ned predicted two deaths: Constable Lonigan, Justice Barry, both died as he said. She dreams of drowning and wonders. Wonders and then drinks, not that drinking helps her when she's already asleep and she opens her eyes underwater and thinks, Again?

There's light, which there isn't always, and a current that pushes her up, which never happens, and she kicks, kicks her way up.

(Is it her imagination or is she actually getting closer in this dream?)

There's weight on her back, pulling at her, digging into her shoulders, making it harder to move her arms. Her imagination or no, no, no, something always goes wrong, she always drowns and this is it, isn't it isn't it isn't it maybe she should just swallow water choke and wake up but that doesn't work she can't wake up she just has to kick and kick and kick and swim and oh God oh God she's actually drowning isn't she air air air air she needs air-

She reaches the surface, gasps, bobs back down, then kicks herself up again.

Air.

Coughing, spluttering, Kate swims over to the edge of the fountain. She takes a moment to haul herself over the edge, falls, but the fall isn't much. More of a roll until she hits the ground, struggles to all fours, all the while coughing up water fit to throw up.

She knows what she needs to it. Sit up, take stock. This isn't a dream, it's not. She needs to get her long, heavy hair out of the way to see, but she can't. All she can do is crouch, cough, and gasp in air.

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"Well, you know where I live now, so gimme a holler if you do want your hair braided." He makes finger-guns at her, because he's a giant child, and grins.

Jake will gladly talk about his niece. "Oh yeah. Real scrappy, too. Her mother blames me for that, but I still maintain it's just good ol' Jensen genetics. We can't help getting into fights. It's not our fault truth, justice, and the American Way needs to be upheld."

The sheer fact that he manages to resist posing with his hands on his hips like Superman should be commended.

"Well, my family's Irish, so you won't be gettin' any argument from me."

Not that they believed in the American Way, obviously. But truth, justice, liberty, Not Bowing To The Establishment?

Oh, yes, that's something any Kelly worth their name can get behind. Even now, after the cost of such has been taken.

"What's her name?"

Cougar can't help his amused smile as he shakes his head, having seen many more countries in summer that are hotter than this, but he still thinks the coat is a little overboard. He defers to her with a nod of his head, though, because it's what she chooses and what she wants. "Australian?" he guesses from her accent, sliding the glass of water he'd prepared while she changed, pushing it towards her for her to drink.

His grin widens, if that's possible. "I thought you had a scrappy look about you." It's a compliment, in case that wasn't obvious. He's not saying she looks scraggly (which she sort of does), but that she looks tough. He's known enough tough women in his life to be able to recognize them when he sees them.

"Beth." Man, he really wishes he had a photo of her now. "Short for Elizabeth. My sister decided to break the whole J-theme our parents had going, and honestly, I think she was right. She's eight now, plays right forward on her soccer team. They're called the Petunias. They're division champs this year. Or, at least. They were, before I came here."

"Yes. From the colony of Victoria, originally." She's travelled since then, unable to stand the hill-country of her birth and all the memories with it.

Then she looks at him for a moment as she accepts the glass of water and, apologetically, adds, "I can't place your accent, I'm sorry."

Swarthy and accented do not, as it happens, get a girl very far at all.

Edited 2016-07-30 04:08 (UTC)

He remembers Sydney and the outback. They had been dropped there to do extreme temperature training in the middle of summer, back in spec ops, and he remembers the delirium that had set in, in the middle of things. "Mexico," he replies, thinking that if she's talking about Victorian colonies (and judging from her attitude about her dress), then maybe she won't know where he's from.

"Sur de Texas, just South," he clarifies.

He bows, and he takes care to look at her face, and at least one part of Kate relaxes a little with it. So many people here with so many different manners and this, at least, is something she suspects she might be able to trust without educating anyone.

He points to the inn and Kate nods again. "That's where I'm staying," she says.

Then she regards him for a moment. Different names for things are important, too. English bundles words together, words and terms and places.

Well, it's worth a try.

"Inn," she says, holding up a finger. Then she says, "Pub," and puts up a second finger. Two words, one places. "Pub is where people drink," and she mimes tipping a glass back.

"Oh," Kate says, and actually laughs quietly. "I know Texas. And Mexico, too. I'm a performer in a show, that's... They bill it as like the Wild West, but I'm sure it's nothing like that actually."

If nothing else, because they are performing in Australia, to Australians, and giving their own twist on show and skills.

"But this is far from home for you? The..." She gestures towards the outer walls and beyond. "The forest and weather."

She takes it as a compliment, too. She can guess his meaning, not her physical state but the inner toughness. The inner ability to survive and get on with things. Fight back. She's not sure how true it all really is any more, but compliments are always nice reminders of good things.

He talks about his niece - Beth, short for Elizabeth - and she doesn't know what he means by 'soccer'. Or at least, not really. A football game, she thinks. She doesn't know 'division', either, in the sense he is using, but she can guess.

A girl, playing a football game, for a certain geographic section, and they are the champions of it. At eight. With a girl.

And Jake Jensen is proud of her.

"We'll work out a way to get out of here," Kate says, impulsively. "And you'll see her again."

Edited 2016-07-30 05:13 (UTC)

"No home, not anymore," is Cougar's answer to her question. He can't really name a place that's home, though Bolivia had been the longest prison in recent months. Even there, it hadn't been by choice that they'd all stayed. No, it had been a forced confinement.

He snorts a little as he gives her an amused look. "Wild West?" he echoes. "With guns and horses and vaqueros?"

Something in the woman's expression made Nerys hesitate a moment. She bought time by parsing the accented Standard, which she hadn't been able to place until now. As far as she could remember, she had never met more than one or two humans from that part of Earth, at the very most, though she had heard of it, and she'd finally been able to figure out that the woman had meant America, upon hearing it a second time. The lack of her commbadge's universal translator was becoming obvious.

But that was beside the point, as Nerys knew enough about Earth to know there had been no colonies in Australia for a very, very long time, and she didn't want to terrify the other woman even further or drive her away by sounding crazy (admittedly, she hadn't been surprised at Nerys' nose, which tickled the back of Nerys' mind a little until she set the thought aside). But at the same time she didn't want to lie, sensed that would go down about as well as 'I'm not from Earth and I'm not a human being'. She had to tread carefully.

"Look, it's not that I don't want to explain, but you probably wouldn't believe me if I told you," she said, with a humorless snort of a laugh. "You'd probably think I was nuts. I sure did when I met a couple of other people here."

His smile dims a little, but it doesn't fade completely. He's used to being separated from his family, and not seeing Beth grow up has become par for the course. Sadly.

"Yeah, I know. Eventually."

In an effort to distract himself, he turns his attention to her instead. "What about you? What's your family like?"

This gets a sharp, measuring look. It's the look of someone who has be condescended to her whole life by authorities and is heartily sick of it. But it's also the look of someone who has been trying to teach herself not to throw herself into a passion, stamp her foot and demand answers.

It's a shifting set of scales, when to push and when not to. She wants to know. But...

But she has to tread carefully, while she has a grip on her temper.

"If you met other people here with surprisin' tales, I'm goin' to as well," Kate points out. "Maybe I should hear it from you first."

She actually knows the last word, a lingering piece of knowledge from one of the crew who had arrived for the gold rush in the '50s and stayed on. Cowboys - drovers, stockhands.

"With guns and horses and vaqueros," Kate says, not mangling the last word as badly as she might have.

"I had a fancy hat and everything."

She doesn't mention what she already implicitly agreed to - that she also had guns, and that she was accurate with them. You have to be, in a show.

"So did I," Cougar sighs, because of all the things he misses, he thinks that he should miss other things more than his rifle and his hat, but, there it is. He hasn't got close ties to a family, he doesn't have a home, and with Jensen here, the only other things he wants are a gun and a hat to shoot under.

Pooch needs to stay with his kid. Clay and Aisha? No, Cougar wouldn't wish them on this place. "I'm not a cowboy, though," he clarifies. "I just had a hat." And a very big gun.

Well, she just set herself up for that one, didn't she. But it's only polite to answer him back, however strange it is to talk about her family to someone who hasn't read all the newspaper for the past five years.

"Large and close," is what she says. "Ma had twelve babies and I'm the seventh. Then there's the cousins and second cousins..."

She shrugs, then.

"We're country people, mostly. Have little selections or work in rural towns. No division champions, but we do win horse-races."

Once he could fully understand the common language of the people here, he planned to learn the modern etiquette. His manners came from his youth before his father's death, and learning to adapt on the farm to keep the farm hands from coming after him. Before he eventually stopped fighting back all together. Good day, thank you, best of health all words he spoke to people who tried to break him, all words he genuinely meant by the time he bought his freedom back. He wanted to be better, and to be better he had to fit in somewhat.

He nodded a mild understanding. He knew stay from Jo, from Jo explaining where she stayed. Where he would stay with her. He pointed down the road a bit more. His other hand returning to his chest to motion to himself. "I stay Jo's Heimili." He spoke in a mix of his language and English. It was hard but for his second day, but he was trying. He moved his hand then. "Pub. Inn." He grasped then two names for one place. It wasn't that unusual. A nod of understanding given, and a bit of a grin, oh he got that gesture. ""Drykki" It sounded enough like drink. A bit of old Norse had been swallowed up into English, so some words were easier for him to pick up.

Edited 2016-07-31 02:37 (UTC)

That flicker of surprise and pause, Jo recognizes that.

Even a few weeks in, she'd rather not be alone with a bear or a wolf.
She liked her odds with a gun against either, but her reflexes and a knife?

"I haven't seen any yet, but given the look of the forest?" Jo looked off in that direction. Not that one could really see much of it from here at all. It was all dusty, undisturbed town. Still looking mostly as deserted, deprived and forgotten as it had when most of them arrived half the month ago. "I'd assume so. There's a number of guys who are in there a lot more often, who'd know a lot more for certain on that."

"I was not really a cowgirl, either," she admits. "We didn't have enough cattle. My family has more horses."

The horses tended to stay. The few sheep, too. But they had enough cows for them, to milk and sell, and that was all.

When Ned and the Greta Mob stole cattle, they never came near Ma's selection.

"I do miss my hates. I saw the little... bonnet, cap hats our captors have given us. They ain't gonna be much use on a sunny day."

He'd seen farms like that in his youth, though Cougar's family hadn't done much with them -- especially not after they had moved from Mexico to California, leaving the family home and land behind for opportunity. "They will do," he admits, but he dislikes them and misses his Stetson, which had been good for so many things. The best had been the way it kept his eyes hidden and his face from being exposed.

He feels on display here, in a way he doesn't like. "Do you think there are horses here?" he asks. "Could you tame one?"

"It's pretty empty," Raleigh admits. "There's probably about two dozen of us, give or take, and the town looks like it's been abandoned for a long time. Ever been to one of those ghost towns after a mine runs dry? That's what it reminds me of."

Raleigh isn't terribly familiar with Australia but, to him, it seems like there's some overlap between that country and the old west. Maybe that's an accurate comparison.

"There's houses, though, so we've moved into them and started making them livable. I'm sure we can get one for you too."

The look was instantly recognizable to Nerys, as it was one she herself had given more than a few people on more than a few occasions, both to people she respected and to people she didn't. More often to the latter--and if anything, it told Nerys that her gut instinct about this woman was correct, and that it would be a very bad idea to get on her bad side.

It was always a bad idea to cause Nerys' own ire, after all.

Because of that recognition, she decided to go with the unvarnished truth. "Good point," she admitted, and cocked her head a little to look the other woman straight on. "Here's your first tale, then: my name is Nerys. I'm from Dahkur Province on a planet called Bajor, but I lived on a station in space, near my homeworld, in the Earth year..." she did a couple of quick calculations in her head, then snorted a laugh again, "2371. Surprising enough, I guess."

She has, as it happens. The gold rush had been boom'n'bust, but that's also not counting drought, the ravages of fire. An area where the land proved just too hard, or the squatters took it away and never did anything with it. Empty homesteads.

"I know the feel of those places," Kate says, a little quietly. There's always something sad about them, something which makes her hands itch to clean and straighten and get a cook-fire going to change the air.

"...a whole house? Just for me?"

If she sounds amazed and incredulous, it's because she is. It's a warm incredulity, the kind with a giggle waiting in the wings from sheer amazement. It's not as if she's buying a house, she knows that.

But the idea of it, even living in one, is such a surreal one, she can't help but blink at him.

"I'll ask. And be careful slippin' on me boots in the morning."

All kinds of nice little hidey-holes in an empty town like this. All kinds of vermin to lure small hunters with scales or too many legs. And then humans come along and mess it all up, or add more lures with no Saint Patrick to banish 'em.

But she doesn't know what to make of the woman in front of her, either. She knows snakes, she knows spiders. She knows the bush, but this isn't the bush surrounding her and this woman is standing there in a brief chemise and trousers without a care in the world.

Not that she objects to the trousers in of themselves.

"Any clothes or the like been left around?" is how she circles around the subject, while trying to ask something important. "I've looked in some of the houses, but not seen any. Or... Anythin' personal."

Edited 2016-08-05 09:50 (UTC)

"I don't know if there are horses here. There could be. Be enough feed for 'em, at least a few. And if there are, I could. Yes."

The Kellys are famously good riders. Famously in love with their horses. She's been riding since almost before she could walk, and in that time has seen a wide, wide range of training and obedience.

"It takes time. Would need a paddock. A halter, a lead. Reins. But I could."

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