My mum,  tornassuk, now has a FurAffinity page. She's a watcher and just getting into the online furry fandom, so I hope everyone goes and makes her feel welcome.

Go over and say hi

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Two from a couple nights ago; one following the sequential dreamscape, one being utter randomness that I can't analyse on my own despite my best efforts.


I came into the dream screaming before I could even see. I ran out of breath around the time I opened my eyes, and settled myself to take in my surroundings. A large room, stucco walls, a large fireplace with an exquisite rug spread before it. I'd been here before, and-- yes, there, a chunk taken out of the wall. I remembered this room, and how the sounds had reverberated in it so painfully.

Appropriate, then, that I'd been screaming.

I went from the door to the fire, warming my suddenly icy flesh. I watched the flames, tried to identify what aromatics had been thrown onto the embers; I could place fresh pine branches and rock samphire, but there were others I was not able to figure out.

"I think, first, I should apologise for my absence."

I turned fast, startled, to find the red-haired woman calmly seated at a table I somehow had not seen, across from where I stood. She appeared almost mannequin-like in her stillness, the firelight gleaning on her hair and shining a little too brightly on her skin. Her eyes were blue, to taunt me perhaps.

I turned back to the fire. "You don't have to. You have much of a life outside myself. I can't expect you to drop everything for me." The fire heated my face.

"I am not the one you need to say these things to," she said quietly, her voice as calm as ever.

"You leave for months, and return to try me with mind tricks?' I growled, not looking at her.

"I don't need them to see you are troubled with your waking life. It is written in everything about you. You wear your grief like a shroud," she said evenly.

"Then I don't need to tell you not to toy with me about them." I tried to keep the bitterness from my voice. I wasn't terribly angry at her in particular. But I had no one else to be angry with.

I heard the soft rustle of cloth as she stood. "Speak to me of them. Please. For your own sake."

I said nothing, tension growing between my shoulderblades as I stared into the flames.

She sighed quietly, moved a little closer. I felt her lay a hand upon my back. I closed my eyes.

"What good would it do to speak again? It wouldn't change anything when I wake."

We were silent for a while. I heard the crackle of the fire, the quiet sounds of my own breathing, the utter silence of her. Her hand was cool on my spine.

"You mourn a shape you have never owned, believing it will take you closer to feeling human. You fear what you must do to achieve such an end, and doubt medicine's ability to free you of your dislocation rather than trap you in another set of flesh. You agonise over your actions driven by hurt and cresting madness, and grieve for the love you fear you have lost. You feel more trapped than ever, turned loose on the world and shut out from those you would give your life for, locked out rather than given freedom. You do not trust your understanding of acceptable human behavior, fearing your words and actions will be taken for obsession and cause you to be shunned all the more. You do not want to trust anyone new again."

I nodded mutely, agreeing with everything, once she was done speaking.

"Tell me why."

"It took so long to let those few in, only to have half claw me to pieces from within. Why should I risk that near-fatal pain again with a stranger, who could hurt me far worse." I spoke in a deadened monotone. I opened my mind to her, showed her just precisely how and where I had been hurt in the past. That happening of a few years ago that I never spoke of.

I heard her gasp softly, a sound of horror.

"You are surprised?" A trace of pitch-black humor in my voice. I turned to slowly pace the room. "I thought you already knew that. You always seemed to."

"I knew only what you did later. I understand your actions so much better now, though it does not excuse them."

I turned on her, a snarl curling my lips. "You, of all people, dare to look down on me for what I have done?" I spat, and paced faster.

She stared at me, utterly still and silent.

"You want so much for me to immerse myself joyfully in the world of mortals, as if it were such a pleasure to be amongst them. Perhaps for you, who looks on them in such a romantic light, but I cannot hold such affections and beliefs of safety with them. You wonder why I cling so to your companion, why I would so long for someone I now see only in my dreams; while conveniently forgetting that while she is the only one left who would hold me, she is the one most honest about the danger she could pose to me. Mortals do not hold such honesty about their capacity to physically harm in my experience."

I continued to pace, caught in my habit, eyes flashing with contained anger.

She watched me pace. "I will not try to convince you otherwise, though I cannot disagree with you more strongly."

"And why is that, pray?" I asked, sarcasm lending bite.

She watched me levelly. "Because you're sounding just like her. You even look like her when you move like that. And when she's like this she cannot be reasoned with. Nor, I think, can you."

I stopped. We stared at each other, I unwilling to look away first, though I knew the stupidity of trying to win a staring match with an immortal.

"You want to take her away from me, don't you?" I said quietly. I felt a tremor running up my spine, across my shoulders, the hairs on my neck standing up immediately.

She turned to lean on the table, as if she were tired. "She is not a good influence to have around you. You surely know this. The changes in your behavior alone should be a marker."

I turned and began to pace again, faster and more shakily holding back my rage. "Now, when I have so little of constance and comfort, you seek to take her from me? You hint to me of trusting strangers, while you would be so cruel as to do this?"

"It must be done, dear one, you must understand. It is best for you both, to go along your lives without the pain of longing."

I glared at her, suicidal and reckless. I pulled images and memories from my mind that had been placed there with purpose, in a locked box, months before.

"You have the gall to presume what is best for us?! You who stood by and allowed her, your maker, to die. You, who took her from me already once before. You, who for all your words of love and understanding still took away my reason once before and hid your actions from me. You, who keep her prisoner now. Do you simply want to be rid of both of us, or doesn't it matter to you which one you kill? I doubt killing her would be too hard on your conscience, now you have some experience," I snarled, goading, untrembling in what was surely my final words. I was purposefully enraging a being older than Christ.

As expected, she made to grab me, crush the life out of me. She stopped just short of touching me, her eyes burning fiercely. "Why are you doing this?" she said softly, dangerously, a voice I had only heard used to threaten the black-haired one.

"If you seek to make my sleeping world as near devoid of comfort as my waking one is, then kill me now." I said, my voice dead and certain.

She stared at me, horror-stricken, then drew away from me like I were poison. "Go, now. Please."







The next is nearly nonsense.
A fragmentary dream between my first wakeup and second (I decided it was too early and went back to sleep). For some reason, Amber invited me to her bat mitzvah, despite her not being in any way Jewish so I dunno where my brain pulled this from. The wtf continued with a rather weird-looking Michael Jackson impersonator. Amber, on the other table behind me with a lot of people I didn't recognise, laughed a little as did her table. My table, full of more people I didn't recognise (except, for some reason, I was sitting next to who appeared to be Snoop Dogg), did not laugh.
We ate some food, and my table smoked cigarettes. I liked this Snoop Dogg guy, and we had some good conversation. Then everyone got up and walked around. Our table took a walk by the river that was there, scaring a family of rabbits out of the undergrowth into the river. They swam out to about the middle of the river before being swept downriver and coming up on the bank further on, except for one baby that swam upstream and came up a little ways away from us. I went to chase it and it ran a little ways, about five metres, but then it stopped. I picked it up, which it essentially allowed after a brief amount of feebly trying to bite my hand, and dried it off on my shirtsleeve before putting it in my shirt pocket. It snuggled in warmly and went to sleep.
I gave the rabbit to Amber who went inside. My group wandered back towards the original building and sat at a trestle table and chairs in the carport, smoking and feeling too pressured inside. Snoop called a puppy who ran/scrambled over from the yard, by looks a little Staffy pup, and we drank some beer.
There was pricking on my ankles under the table. I peered under the tablecloth and found Amber and a blondish girl putting a kitten on my leg. It was attempting to hiss and generally failing at being menacing. The girls laughed and stood up, whereupon Amber informed me that Sonja (I guess the blonde there) and she didn't think that I should hang around anymore. I brought up the point that she was the one who invited me, but she didn't seem to hear me. She said that they (they, now?) didn't approve of cursing and sexual innuendo, and I was brain-numbingly confused. I hadn't used any, and Amber swears a lot. I tried to bring up these points but it was like talking to a stranger, and I wondered if this was actually the right person.