OPEN log; and forgive us our trespasses

[paterelohim]

Who: Chuck Shurley and YOU
When: anytime from May 23rd onward
Where: your character's dreams
Summary: Dream-creeping for absolution of guilt and plague relief.
Warnings: TBA

[Chuck knows there's only one way to really cure people of this disease. He starts creeping into dreams, starting very early Wednesday morning. It's as easy as going to sleep and slipping quietly into a dream, even if he doesn't recognize the dreamer, as naturally as if he were an extension of their own subconscious.

But he isn't nice about it.

They get nightmares: called up images of whatever festers at the dark center of their conscience. A vivid recollection of what's keeping them sick, so He might learn about it, make them confront it, and talk them through it like their own personal Yoda or Jiminy Cricket.

They might find themselves caught in it, only for a hand to reach out to them and yank them from the horror into a much calmer dream- Chuck's hand. They might have Chuck standing beside them, watching the horror, only for it to melt away. They might find themselves sitting on a couch with him, watching the memory on TV. There are a thousand possibilities.

No matter what, all the dreams will (hopefully) end the same: with Chuck slipping away, having given them (hopefully) some internal forgiveness and the kind of absolution that only comes from God.]


((OOC: so obviously, Chuck is wandering through giving out absolution with his God-powers. Every thread might NOT end in total forgiveness or absolution, depending on the severity of your character's guilt AND how cooperative with the conversation your character is- but everyone who comments WILL at least show improvement of symptoms. Unless we OOC-ly work out something else, I would really strongly prefer that your character NOT remember that Chuck specifically was in their dream.

If you comment, please put their name and the date/time in the subject line, and describe the source of their guilt in the comment. Chuck will show up in an already))

Comments

Marco; May 25

[guerrilla_morph]

He will never forget the mountain summit.

The wind is impossible, pushing and whipping it's way in every direction, the air heated by Dracon beams firing at the Hork-Bajir - except it is only illusions, holograms projected by the Chee as an attempt to throw the Yeerks' scent off on the real Hork-Bajir valley.

And there he is, a mighty mountain goat, staring down at his mother and Visser One, one entity now.

He remembers the day when he and Mom talked about the New Hampshire license plate, or when she taught him the important lesson "it is easier to cry than to laugh". He remembers the time when she made him soup, how she tells him that she loves him forever. But Marco remembers Visser One, the woman who let him and his friends loose on the Blade Ship. He remembers the hammerhead project, with her telling his "Yeerk" to control him more.

< I love you, > he whispers and he lunges, to take Visser One out once and for all, to take out his own mother, she is just one life, one life against millions.

It is the right thing to do. The only way out.

[paterelohim]

Marco makes contact. There's no Jake to intercept him, no savior from above to take that choice away from him and give him the mercy of not having to kill his mother. No. Here he actually hits her and Chuck watches, standing off to the side, unseen in the middle of the war and pandemonium, and watches a child murder his mother to save the world.

There's no slow motion- not to him, at least. To Marco, maybe, time might slow down at the moment his rams' horns slam into Visser One's stomach, when she buckles almost in half and screams in pain. Maybe he will remember every millisecond of running those extra few steps and slamming to a halt with his hooves just edging over the cliff-brink. He might, but Chuck sees it at normal speed: a ram slamming at full speed into a small woman's stomach and sending her bleeding form flying off a cliff with nothing to catch her fall.

She seems to fall for an eternity, shrieking and terrified, before a single crack pierces through the chaos and brings nothing but silence. The instant Visser One hits the ground, unseen, everything and everyone around them melts away - the Hork-Bajir, the Chee, the Yeerk ship and Visser Three arriving soon and the Animorphs starting to converge in horror. It all vanishes in an instant, leaving only Chuck, Marco, and the silence.

When he starts stepping down the mountain, his footfalls and few displaced pebbles tumbling seem to echo hugely in the quiet.

Pretend this is a mountain goat icon

[guerrilla_morph]

She's gone.

Both of them: gone. It's over. The game is done, Marco as the winner.

So why does he feel as though he lost everything? What is it called, when a victory isn't a victory? Oh right: pyrrhic victory. That's what this feels to Marco.

And who wins, in the end? Visser Three? He's still alive. But the Hork-Bajir, the Chee, his friends, they are all alive -

where are they? Where is Jake and the others?

The silence is far more dangerous than the noise of death from above. Marco turns and he sees a man. Older man, with a beard and all. Boring, plain guy who probably spends more time in an university than his own house.

Marco stares at him through the eyes of the goat, unblinking as the man walks down the mountain, heading toward Marco's direction.

okay fine :|a

[paterelohim]

Chuck continues to wend his way down the mountain, until they're on the same level ledge, then stands there across from him, wind whipping around them. It's heart-breaking, what he sees here.

After a moment lapses in silence, he frowns at the goat, expression melting into earnest concern. "Marco... why are you crying?"

[guerrilla_morph]

< I'm not, > Marco lies, feeling himself retreating into the recesses of the goat's simplistic mind, where it doesn't care about dead mothers or parasites, but only the need to climb to find more grass and escape predators. No, goats cannot cry.

< There's nothing to cry or feel bad about when you do the right thing. The only thing. >

[paterelohim]

"The right thing," he repeats skeptically, like it's half a joke. He gets more urgent, stepping closer, not letting Marco slip away like that. "Right. Do you have any idea what that actually is?"

"I mean, look at you, man." Chuck gestures sweepingly over the place- the mountain, the empty skies once screaming with ships, the far-off valley with its distant Hork-Bajir. "This is no Pyrrhic victory. The only one who lost everything is you."

[guerrilla_morph]

< One life. One life versus, what, five billion? Five billion lives and counting. So what if I lost everything? At least I haven't lost the big picture. One mother dies . . . > he trails off, trying to get a hold of himself. For some reason the goat mind is slipping away, leaving Marco totally alone. < And billions of mothers can survive and live without ever being enslaved. >

Marco's mind turns dark, looking for something to place this awful feeling inside of him, like claws made out of nails digging out of his throat. < And it better to die free than live a slave. Always better. >

[paterelohim]

"Does that really change anything?" he asks, unflinchingly staring the other down. "Nothing gets past the fact of what you actually did here- I mean, for fuck's sake. You just killed your own mother. If Jake hadn't been there in real life, you would've committed matricide, and for what? The master plan? There are other ways."

[guerrilla_morph]

"What OTHER WAYS?!" Marco yells and he is no longer a mountain goat but a boy once more.

No one gets it, because there is only a group of kids standing between the Yeerks and total human enslavement. How can anyone understand the pressure of it? The times when you look at the abyss and the abyss doesn't just stare, it actively tells you it will kill you and everything you ever loved.

"There were no other options, never have been! Do I risk everyones' identities and lives simply because I want her back? I can't die because Dad will lose it too. We are out numbered, out gunned,so when we take a shot, we take it."

[paterelohim]

"At any expense, right?" He shouts back. Chuck steps closer, getting right up in the kid's face and towering over him. "All those Controllers you guys ever killed, all the innocent Hork-Bajir who ever wanted to just go back to their homes and their families, sure, I guess you can make them just casualties- you can!"

Louder. Meaner. He has to push Marco farther, has to drag out the ugliest feelings, the deepest darkness, the darkest shadows poisoning his psyche.

"Will you stop trying to defend yourself? Jesus christ- you almost killed your own mother. Only one kind of person does that- you know that. It's destroying you more every day you're stuck with her. Can you even live with yourself?"

[guerrilla_morph]

"See, that's the fucking point," Marco says harshly, pointing a finger at Chuck. The resemblance to his mother is astounding, really. "We hurt the innocent to stop evil. Innocent Hork-Bajir, Taxxons, everything that ever got caught up in this war, we had to hurt them one way or the other. There's no point in making any peace with that, only that we did to take another step closer to winning it."

And then he laughs, but there is no humor in it, it is harsh and unyielding as the might of the grizzly bear.

"And every time we do, we fall back two steps. So there's nothing fair about it - nothing is fair."

At the mention of his mother, Marco's face darken into the terrible rage that he rarely shows to everyone - except Jake. Always Jake. Jake knows Marco's hatred, knows how deep it can go, how it can drip down and coat everything.

"I'm the kind of person that gets things done," Marco replies stonily. "And if Visser One ever does anything that even hints of her doing the exact same thing she and her kind ever done in this island, I will do whatever it takes to put her down. No one needs Visser One."

But I want my mother, is that little voice inside him quip quietly.

[paterelohim]

"She's all alone," Chuck retorts sharply. "The danger she is at home doesn't exist here."

He lets silence settle around them thickly. "All that's left is you. If it was really the right thing to do, you wouldn't need to argue with yourself so hard."

[guerrilla_morph]

"She's still dangerous," Marco snapped back, the wind picking up speed and now howling at their ears. "Visser One knows how to fake humanity very well, enough to fool even the most suspicious paranoid creep. She has god knows what kind of knowledge of advanced Yeerk technology that she can sell for the highest bidder, for either SERO or AGI or god knows what else on this godforsaken island. She can persuade people to be on her side. Me? I'm just a kid. I don't have any of my friends here, no allies, nothing. I can't afford to trust anyone with this. One wrong person, one wrong move and I'm worse than dead."

Marco sighed and suddenly flops down on the coach. The mountain summit is gone, and there is only the empty, sad living room of Marco and his father's - and now Nora's - house. The TV is on, the sound is mute.

"She thought I was a Controller once. It doesn't take a genius to know that I'm not a Controller any more - or maybe she suspected that I never was in the first place. There are no way outs in this, just like back home when she realized I'm an Andalite bandit. No Yeerk was ever supposed to know, especially not the leader of the entire Yeerk military."