goneawayworld | Invasion!

Entry tags:

Invasion!

Who: The New Hires
What: Sudden Memory Share
Where: Their Memory Palaces
When: After Intermission
Warnings/Notes: Possible in every memory, warn in subject lines.

Contact.

It's during a pause in their day. A nap. An idle moment looking across the Top Deck. Taking a slow breath between reps in the training room.

The New Hires are connected. Mental pathways locking together, they're forced into one another's innermost beings. Thrust into one another's memory palaces where the mind collects and stores everything that makes them who they are. The core of their beings are only a few steps away and no one can help the violation.

To make matters worse, it comes with no explanation or no ability to pull out and stop. Once they're through the first memory, perhaps they can find a way out, but they're already witnessing some event from their host's past. And, if they left, who knows whether or not they'd end up accidentally invading another memory palace?

And if they were there, who was in theirs?

[[So, how this works: the memories can either be viewed in spectator mode or experiencing everything themselves. The person whose memories are being shown, the host, can watch as their current self or take the form they had of their past self.

They cannot control the first memory shown, the player decides that, but they can control any other memories they'd like to show people. Of course, there's always the option of an extreme emotional reaction bringing up memories unbidden.]]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Ronan still looked like he could spit nails. "You don't need fine motor control to throw shit around." He rubbed the back of his head, his fingers threading through his own hair. It was strange but familiar and since he no longer had his leather wristbands, this was the best he could do to keep his hands occupied.

"It's come in useful. But I'm as liable to harm my friends as my foes using it." Not entirely. He wasn't that out of practice with it. But it took a different kind of careful for applications like his powers were suited to.

Well, Ronan could relate to that. Sort of. He'd usually been the one getting hurt.

"Do you know anyone else who can do it? I never got in control of mine until I met another dreamer."

Considering his father was right behind him and clearly shared the same power, this seemed an absurd statement. But it took a moment for Ronan to realize that. He felt a brief moment of denial before his shoulders sagged slightly. Niall should have been the one to teach him.

Yeah. That's not lost on Sam in the least. "The only person I knew of that had telekinesis was...he died soon after we met him."

The Winchesters had taken care of Max. But it would really only have been a matter of time.

"When I was able to get instruction, it was from a...source that I really shouldn't have trusted. Things went pretty badly from there."

Ronan scoffed but at his own memories, not Sam. "Yeah, sounds familiar. The first dreamer I met-- who wasn't my father-- was fucked up. But he did teach me something before losing it completely." He was clearly still bitter about what had happened.

"He died too." This time Ronan sounded a little conflicted, but mostly his tone was flat. It was hard to feel too sorry about Kavinsky's death.

"It's rough, getting powers you don't know what to do with and can't control. Rougher than a lot of people would understand." And there were a few on the Rig that probably could understand. "My dad kept things from me, too. I think he thought he was protecting me, but it didn't work out that way in the end. It just left me unprepared for what was to come."

"I think," Ronan said slowly. "That's what my dad thought." He was fairly sure of it, based on everything his brother had said, but he'd never get the chance to ask him. Even if he tried now, his father either wouldn't answer or would just say what Ronan wanted to hear.

"It ended the same way." Those words should have felt wrong to say, standing here in his parents' room, the echo of his father behind him. But he let the truth of it sink in.

Ronan's gaze was hard but the look on his face was tired, not angry. "How'd it work out for you? Did you figure out what to do?"

The room shifted because Sam let himself think about it a moment too long. A cemetery, the Impala and his brother's bloody face as there was an almost physical sensation of retching control of his body back. They could watch as Sam pulled away, the rings in his hand as he started saying something in Latin, a void opening up behind him.

Sam managed to pull away from that memory, back to something...easier. Two boys in a field setting off fireworks. One of Dean's favorite memories, not Sam's. But easier to deal with. "You could say that."

Now free of his own memory, Ronan's appearance shifted back to his nineteen year old self. His sharp expression now fit his face and the same went for his posture with his build and tattoo.

His gaze was intense as he stared at Sam in the wake of that brief flash of memory. The fireworks were nice but not distracting. Ronan's own memories of them had been tainted.

"What was that?"

Sam lets out a breath. "That's what I figured out to do. What I was unprepared for and had to scramble to figure out."

He flicks through his memories and finds a calm one. A library in the midwest, looking for info on a case. Nothing important, but it's quiet and steady and he needs that for a moment.

"The demon that my premonitions were linked to...it caused that by giving me a taste of his blood when I was a baby." God, it sounds crazy when he puts it like that. "It did that to other kids, too, wanting a general for Hell's armies. Only, of course, there was more to it."

At the mention of the word 'demon,' Ronan froze. He had to split his focus into paying attention to what Sam said while keeping himself here in the moment. It mostly worked. There was a flicker of pure black, the complete absence of color, and as he grounded himself back in the library he realized that Sam had finished talking.

Hell's armies, he finally registered. Different demon.

"You mean, a good old fashioned biblical kind of demon," he said more to reiterate the point to himself. Then that sank in. "Damn. Did it possess you?"

"Not that one, no." Which didn't mean he hadn't been possessed. Because he absolutely had. Just not by Yellow-Eyes. "Even a lot of hunters don't know that demons are real back home. They're good at hiding as humans. Which makes sense. They used to be human."

"Not--" Ronan stopped. Any further words lodged in his throat. After seeing his mother, it was too much. He clenched his hands into fists and took a deep breath. "Not the one back home," he said eventually. "Did you kill it?"

"It's dead. My brother did it, not me, but it's the same thing."

He'd had a chance. He hadn't taken it. But he figures the kid would understand if they ever got into that.

Of course, the place around them rocked for a moment as he dwelled a moment too long on both of those memories. So Sam refocused himself on the current memory, shoring the library up. "Things like that are likely to be different from world to world. The rules change, near as I can tell."

The library kept periodically darkening then going back to normal as Ronan regained control. It happened over and over while he pretended not to notice.

"Yeah, I got the shitty one." All demons were awful, of course. Ronan was just-- well, justifiably biased. And he needed to think of something else before Sam saw why. "Where's this?"

The problem might be because it wasn't a very strong memory for Sam. More of an amalgamation of memories for him of years spent in the library. It made it easy to keep the memory going without much thought, but also didn't make it very hard for Ronan to try taking control.

The specific library, though... "The library at Stanford University. I was going for pre-law. Never got to graduate, but I spent a lot of time in here."

Ronan looked at the library with renewed interest. He'd never got a chance to see Harvard's library. It probably didn't look anything like this anyway.

"Let me guess. Demons and magic and whatever ruined it." The interest faded and his slight hunch returned to his shoulders.

"Yes and no." Sam found a table and leaned back against it. Nearby, a young man who looked very like Sam but half a dozen years or so younger, hunched over a book, highlighter between his teeth as he scribbled down notes in a notebook. "I've never known a time when that stuff wasn't part of my life. Not properly, at least. Dad kept me from knowing about it until I was about eight, but I knew we weren't a normal family from the off. We moved around too much, Dad was gone too often, that sort of thing."

He shrugged. "The demons and stuff didn't help, of course. They were the reason I left in the end. I just...have kinda come to the conclusion that it would have been inevitable. That I wouldn't have been able to have that 'apple pie' life, as my brother likes to call it. Just wouldn't have been a good fit."

Ronan looked at the younger Sam, then around at the library. By the furrow in his brow and intent look in his eyes, he was clearly working through something in his head. His thoughts were on the boyfriend he'd left behind.

"My boyfriend's at Harvard," he said before he caught himself. "I dropped out of high school. College isn't for people like me." Finally, he look at Sam again. "Or people like us, I guess." He tugged on his leather wristbands. "Shit, I just wanted to be a farmer."

He snapped the bands. "Does your whole family have demon blood in them? Is that why you've got-- I don't even know what your family business is."

...Maybe he didn't want to know. The fairy market certainly drove home the fact that there were things in the world he just didn't want to see.

Sam smiled, but it's one of a sort of sad understanding. Empathic. "Yeah, probably not. Everything else keeps coming up and wanting our attention. Not good for trying to keep going with a pre-law degree."

Technically, anything could be a pre-law degree. But that wasn't the point.

Sam shook his head at the question. "Just me. It's...there were extenuating circumstances. Bad decisions made out of emotion before my brother or I were even born. Some of them made centuries or millennia ago, even."

"Who wants to be a lawyer anyway. The ties'll just choke you." Ronan started to mime a hand around his throat-- at least before he turned pale and looked away. He lowered his hand to his side.

"Sounds a hell of a family business and I don't even know what you really do." He noted that the definite lack of an answer to it. Maybe he shouldn't press but the main reason he didn't do that with others was the fear of reciprocity. Seeing as Sam already knew Ronan's big secret, that wasn't as much of a worry.

"I wanted to help people in a...more tangible way, I guess. A way that didn't end up with quite so many illegalities involved." And God knew how many illegalities were involved in Hunting.

Sam huffed a half laugh, reaching up to brush his hair back. "We Hunt." The capital H was practically a thing you could hear. "The things that everybody has forgotten about, the monsters of myth and legend that thrive in the dark where they can kill with impunity? That's what we Hunt."

"A way that let you keep your soul?" Ronan couldn't help himself there. He'd heard enough lawyer jokes and gone to school with enough sons of lawyers who either wanted to grow up to be just like their probably corrupt father or wanted to rebel against it.

"So what, demons, werewolves, vampires?" Ronan asked. His thoughts went to Stacia.

THAT rocked the memory.

The library disappeared, becoming a country road at night. Sam's there, younger and standing beside a black muscle car. Another man was at his side, leather jacket and close-cropped blond hair, features similar enough to be his brother.

"You know," the memory Sam said. "When Jake saw me, it was like he saw a ghost." The other guy scoffed, but stopped to listen. "I mean, hell. You hear him, Dean. He said he killed me."

"Glad he was wrong." The other guy -- Dean -- looked cagey. Wary.

"I don't think he was, Dean." Sam frowned and looked to the other man. "What happened? After I was stabbed?"

Which probably explained the wariness. "I already told you."

"Not everything."

Dean looked exasperated, but his resolve was obviously crumbling. Sam knew how to play his brother. "Sam, we just killed the demon. Can we celebrate for a minute?"

Sam gave him a serious look. "Did I die?"

"Oh, come on."

Still serious, but straightening a bit to try to tower over Dean. "Did you sell your soul for me, like Dad did for you?"

Dean was trying to stay stoic, but the crumbling was becoming more obvious. "Oh, come on, no!"

"Tell me the truth." Sam turned the puppy dog eyes on his brother. "Dean, tell me the truth."

And that was it. Dean sniffed, then chuckled, shaking his head. "Sam..."

"How long do you get?" Voice breaking, uncertain.

"One year. I got one year."

Sam managed to get the memory wretched away, or at least to freeze. The car, the road. Neither him nor Dean in sight, because he needed that for the moment. "Uh...uh, yeah. If they're killing humans, that's what we go after." A moment just to breathe. "I know about Stacia, we've talked. She's fine. Nothing to worry about there."

This just kept getting more awkward. Some memories just shouldn't be dived into. Ronan looked away from the brothers. If Sam saw any of his memories with Declan or some with Matthew--

He tried to shut down those thoughts.

"Yeah, good." As much as he tried to forget what he'd seen, he had to ask. "What happened to your brother?"

Invasion!

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