So Make A Wish On Heaven

[these_balls]

Who: Participants of the Dream Plot!
Where: In your dreams!
When: Anytime your character is asleep on April 17th!
Summary: As promised, this is a catch-all log where people can post a character's dream as a top-level comment and allow other holders of our Mysterious Feathers™ to come visit them! Remember that the content of your dream is entirely up to your discretion, but we ask that you only have one, and to please also warn for content as needed!
Rating: PG, and please warn for threads that may go higher!
Log:

[Under the light of the full moon, the Mysterious Feathers™ begin to glow.

In the hours that follow after they sprawl out to sleep, those who had the good fortune (or at least the insatiable curiosity) to pick up one of those feathers earlier in the week will come to discover that something very strange is happening across the regions of Johto and Kanto. There's a saying about what happens when you let your mind wander; this time, though, it's a little more than just one's mind that's going wandering, as dream after dream stretches out before you like a horizon just begging to be chased.

Don't worry about getting lost, dreamers; as real and vivid as they may seem, your surroundings are really only visions and illusions, and in the end the failsafe way to escape from them is to simply wake up. If and when you do, you might feel perfectly well-rested or as on-edge as if you'd just jolted awake from a nightmare; like the dreams themselves, there's really no telling how the experience will play out for you, being different and unique to everyone.

But for now, you've got the whole night ahead of you, filled with places to go and people to see. Might as well make the most of it while it lasts...]

Comments

[envy_the_sinners]

This didn't feel like a village to be found in the Pokémon world. There was a foul stench in the air and no explanation for it.

Scar explored cautiously for any sign of life, but he strangely wasn't surprised when there wasn't one to be found. There weren't a very many homes, but for some reason he was pulled to one in particular.

Apparently he wasn't completely alone here, after all.

It felt wrong, like something internal was off, seeing Lust low on the floor and vulnerable. Of course he knew that she had suffered in life, but she never went into great detail. It was always passed off as something that didn't bother her. At times like this, it was always Scar who had fallen apart. What was he supposed to do?

He hesitated before crossing the room. Hesitated before crouching next to her and before reaching out to rest a hand on her back.

Cold.

[a_sin_for_him]

She knew it was him without lifting her head.

"No. You shouldn't be here."

Not that she wished to hide this - though part of her did - but that this place, these memories...they were of another man. Where was he? But Lust already knew that. He was dead.

She pushed herself up, kneeling and raking her hair out of her face with her gloved fingers.

"There's nothing left here, anyway."

[envy_the_sinners]

Scar's concern faded into a frown. Fine. He drew his hand away, fingers curling in his lap.

"There's clearly something." She didn't get to brush him off and start with the dramatics.

[a_sin_for_him]

"There was. Once. There was life and love and a happy home." Lust looked back to the dirtied floor. "But I ruined it."

She got to her feet, subdued and muted. It didn't make sense for Scar to be here. What meaning was there in that? Maybe it was just all connected. Scar, his brother, Lujon...

"You have enough bad memories, you don't need mine added to the sea."

[envy_the_sinners]

"And you have told me that the point of this... thing we are doing is to share things, regardless of how noble we think it is not to 'burden' each other." Scar sat for another moment before standing up again.

He preferred her standing. Seeing her curled on the floor was more uncomfortable the longer he thought about it.

[a_sin_for_him]

Lust shook her head.

"I don't know how." She turned to face the doorway. She couldn't look at the room, she couldn't look at Scar. "There aren't many things I regret doing, in my former life. I regret this. What I did here."

Not the destruction of the village, though she supposed she felt badly, but Lujon in particular. He'd just been some goodhearted man who'd wanted to use alchemy to heal and help.

And he'd loved her.

[envy_the_sinners]

Scar's brow furrowed. Was she speaking on it because she wanted tell him about what happened? It was always difficult to know.

"Was this town a mark?" He stuffed his hands in his pockets, still watching her with that perpetual, grim expression.

[a_sin_for_him]

Lust nodded.

"It was different than the others, though. There was no pompous old alchemist seeking personal glory and riches. Just a kind young man who wanted to do good. Heal. Stop others from suffering. He had a good life, a fiance."

She put her hand to her head as though she were in pain. She never spoke about Lujon, to anyone. She'd done so many distasteful things, but this...it had been horrible. And she couldn't make up for it or set it somehow right, like other wrongs she carried any weight from.

If she were human, her stomach would have twisted from telling Scar these things. But if anyone had a right to know...

"I didn't even need to manipulate him. He was so eager and earnest..."

[envy_the_sinners]

Scar didn't have to ask about the fate of Lujon. He knew well enough what happened to anyone unfortunate enough to cross Lust's path.

It was awful to think this, but it was almost a bit of a relief that she felt remorse for this.

"If you let guilt fester, it will poison your mind," he warned quietly. How long had Lust kept this to herself?

[a_sin_for_him]

"What else can I do with it?" Lust turned to Scar the, her face a mask of distress and sorrow. "I tried...I left. I was careful with the truth, I painted him as useless. Not worth wasting my time on. But he found me. After two years, he found me and he still..."

Through fate or bad luck or something else, he'd found her and brought her back to that place and asked her again to be his. What else could she have done? What other fate could possibly have befallen Lujon? At least his death had been quick at her hands.

"I tried. I can't make it better, now. I can't undo what's been done. Why shouldn't my guilt eat me from the inside?"

[envy_the_sinners]

"The point isn't to undo anything. It's to find a way to live with yourself and learn not to repeat what you've done."

Which from personal experience... she did a questionable job of that.

"It ruins you, when you let it sit. It just does." There was a rare, unguarded earnestness in how he watched her. Scar didn't go a day without seeing his own mistake flash in front if him, and now he couldn't stop it.

[a_sin_for_him]

"Sometimes I think I deserve to be ruined. I couldn't save him. I couldn't save you. I couldn't even save myself." Her voice was dull, and Lust twisted her hands together, still turned toward Scar. Ironic, that he was the one telling her not to just live with her guilt.

But she supposed he would know best.

"I want to be a good person, I do. But sometimes I wonder how I possibly could be."

It was impossible to hide from it, here in this empty dead place. The doubts and fears that only assaulted her in the dark depths of sleepless nights.

[envy_the_sinners]

Scar's stomach twisted in a painful knot. How could she blame herself for a death he had knowingly walked to?

"You can't place blame for that on yourself. I would do all the same things again regardless." Scar liked to at least think that he had had some say in his death. He knew that it had been orchestrated, but he had also gone to Lior with a very good idea that he wouldn't be leaving.

"Everything was always stacked against us." And they did what they could. Mistakes were made, but not out of malice.

[a_sin_for_him]

"All of them?" Lust repeated the words softly, not really intending it to be a question that had an answer. "I think I would, too. What other choice was there?"

Stacked against them. That was putting it mildly.

"But I hate it, sometimes. It was like being a little wind up toy set on a track." No real choice, just the illusion of it. Do anything differently and things would only be worse. All that was left were so many years full of memories that meant little to nothing, or brought pain and unpleasant feelings. She hadn't even been left the good memories of her first life to counter them in some way.

"I can take the blame for this, if nothing else."

[envy_the_sinners]

What was that supposed to mean? Scar looked away for the first time in several moments. It was getting more and more difficult to find the right things to say.

"We should leave." His hand moved, just barely, towards hers, indicating that she could take it if she wanted.

[a_sin_for_him]

Lust took his hand.

"It doesn't matter if we leave," she admitted. "It's always with me. He never suspected I was anything other than I said I was. I wonder what would have been different if he did. If I'd ever been honest about anything..."

But she'd never said a word, and she'd killed him and still said nothing that would give him any understanding.

Maybe there was some reason she found herself with a man she couldn't be emotionally honest with. Or didn't need to be.

"My own emotions have always frightened me, I suppose." She sighed. "I apologize, you don't want to hear all this maudlin rambling nonsense."

[envy_the_sinners]

"Yes, but being in here won't help." Scar started to walk toward the door, but he stopped when she apologized.

"As if I haven't gone on a dozen maudlin ramblings with you," he pointed out a bit more gently than he usually spoke. Scar struggled to speak again, for a moment. "You don't need to apologize," he nearly whispered. "You speak on your emotions far better than I do."

[a_sin_for_him]

"No. I suppose it won't."

There was nothing left for her here. She made a small noise in her throat that could have been a chuckle.

"And I suppose you have. I've never spoken on this at all before. The other men, the other alchemists...I barely thought of them as people. I still don't. They used me as much as I used them. Lujon...he didn't. There was never even anything physical between us, but he...." she couldn't finish the sentence. It still hurt and frightened her, how Lujon had loved her.

"He was a good man that cared. And I killed him."

There. She'd said it.

[envy_the_sinners]

"It makes things more bearable, to speak on them." Scar wasn't surprised that she had killed him. He almost didn't say what he did next.

"Did you care for him?" Scar continued to stare ahead.

[a_sin_for_him]

Lust was quiet a moment.

"I don't know."

She gave the only honest answer she could. "I felt something, I think. If for no more reason than he was good and kind and cared for me without being coaxed or prompted to. I'd never known that."

There was no real sense to glossing over details now. Scar deserved honesty.

"He was supposed to get married. On his wedding day told me how he felt and asked me to be with him. I left that night. But he found me years later and asked me the same thing again. Idiot. If he'd just stayed..."

Interesting, wasn't it, how the outbreak has resurfaced so suddenly, two years later. Considering it hadn't been a natural outbreak in the first place.

[envy_the_sinners]

Scar had to admit to himself that Lujon did sound incredibly foolish, but... he wasn't one to talk. Not when he still had bullet scars on his chest because of this woman.

"You're saying 'if' too much. You should stop considering it that way. What's done is done." He waited for the inevitable 'but I can't help it.'

[a_sin_for_him]

"What's done is so cruel. What ifs have the potential to be kind."

Lust shook her head, trying to shake away the things preying at her mind.

"Not in any realistic envisioning, there was no hope once he'd caught my master's eye. I just wish I'd told him something kind, given him something real, been...good for him." She dropped her eyes.

"Perhaps I wouldn't be quite so miserable at it now."

[envy_the_sinners]

Scar stopped walking again.

"That is completely illogical," he said simply. It just was. It was another moment before he spoke again.

"You aren't miserable at it." He felt an uncomfortable quiver in the back of his throat, and that damn lightness in his stomach. "You're awkward, but less so than I am. You make me..." he trailed off again, not sure of what to say.

[a_sin_for_him]

"In comparison, maybe." Lust shrugged. "I struggle with my emotions, with expressing them properly. I think and feel so many things that I never say. I don't know how to comfort anyone properly. It's hard to learn these things, late in life."

She squeezed his hand, her own eyes lowering. She wondered if he'd intended to say something and thought better, or simply had no words for expression.

[envy_the_sinners]

"Better," he finally mumbled, as if his brain was still stuck on what he had failed to say rather than realizing what Lust had been saying in response.

"Everyone has emotions they never verbalize. It is awkward for everyone, sharing emotional things."

As evidenced by his muffled rambling only a moment ago.