POA ch012 — Dream of Home

Summary: Henry dreams of home, but not his. He wakes up with a gift. Naomi chats with you.

Author's Notes: Hey, how’d you get here?

Content Warnings: Scopophobia, injury mention, lil’ bit of body horror.

Henry wakes up disoriented and a bit chilly.

He is not in pain. He is not in his bed.

Henry sits up and looks at his hands. They are unblemished.

Wait, why wouldn’t they be?

Henry clambors out of bed. He needs to go to work. It’s funny, actually, that he would be sleeping at home, instead of slumped across his desk, beneath the Hive Mind. It’s funny that he’d allow himself to be separated from it, instead of leaning against it, willing it to finally, finally work.

Henry walks out of the apartment.

Henry is out on the streets. He weaves between storefronts and through dark patches that are just a hair too viscous to be true shadows. Eyes peer out of the crevices in walls. Some of them blink with a strange, unearthly luminosity, others offer little more than a feeling of being watched. Gooseflesh creeps down Henry’s arms. Something is wrong, something is strange. All the same, he navigates through the city following a path he has trod a thousand times before.

No, wait, Henry hasn’t—

This is not a place he has ever been, because he can’t have. Perhaps he’s caught glimpses, the way Ash had. But this— he is here. He is home. How did you…?

Huh.

Henry climbs two sets of ladders and three flights of stairs before popping out into the surface level. The city rises just as far below as it soars above. The Parliament building is its crowning jewel, Apeiron Laboratories are its deepest bowels. The face of this great beast of a city is the most striking: Henry flinches at the sound of the Infinite Clock. The whole city ticks to its pace, something which its inhabitants no longer notice but which foreigners always find off-putting. The huge face of the Clock shines out of the fog like a hovering, imposing moon.

Home remains magnificent despite its recent wounds. The sprawling clockwork of the city is punctured by patches of wild, dark vegetation that crawls up the buildings. As Henry glances around, even through the fog he can make out whole neighborhoods reduced to black fields of dark green grasses and shadowy trees. The lingering effects of the last conquest, when the Mirror met the Wilds — and won.

As always.

He knows where he is going in that mysterious way of dreams: the knowledge is there, Henry’s feet mark the route with confident steps, and yet Henry has never made this journey, has never walked these streets. Henry catches the 9:15 bus and rides it the few miles to the center of the city. He steps out as though this is his routine to take, his, and not—

Hang on, how are we (Henry, you, and… well.) here?

The ticking of the Clock is soothing as a heartbeat, though it continues to prick at Henry. Each rumbling second shudders through his bones and tugs at his breaths and the un-synced thump-thump of his heart. Home is orderly and punctual. It has none of the wildness of Henry, Ash, and Naomi’s existences. Home functions just like the Infinite Clock: people and gears and cogs running in a prescribed way, each engineered in a desperate grapple to keep ticking along. Home is painted in a thousand monochrome grays, not like Henry’s Oxford, where dark gray clouds give way to honey-colored stone buildings and green meadows and pink sunsets. Were he actually in the Mirror, and not merely experiencing a dream-memory, he would stick out so profoundly it would almost be funny. Henry looks out of place here.

Pasted-on.

The journey is at once intimately familiar and strangely foreign, after spending so much time in another world. Shadowy figures grumble and rub up against Henry’s shoulders. Their skittering appendages trace across his shins and biceps and the back of his neck, and Henry cries out with discomfort. He frees himself of the bus as quickly as he can, a block from Parliament. It’s funny, really. This could be a memory (although, not Henry’s, of course), but not a particular one. It’s a distillation of a thousand different mornings on a thousand virtually identical days, swathed in the soupy unreality of a dream.

Henry strides into Parliament and into the private, employees-only elevator. The elevator begins to move, taking Henry where he needs to go. He looks at the mirrored walls of the elevator and jumps; he cannot see himself in them.

“This is a dream,” Henry says aloud. “I read somewhere, you can’t see yourself in mirrors in dreams.”

You have never dreamed before.

The elevator arrives at one of the lowest, most secretive floors. Henry is deep in Apeiron Laboratories now. The ticking of the Clock is muffled, down here.

The doors slide open. Henry walks forward. Now that he has become aware of his dream state, he walks with less certainty and glances nervously over his shoulder. That strange purpose, characteristic of the unaware dreamer, has vanished, replaced by growing unease.

Henry moves cautiously down the white hallways. This deep, the flickering fluorescent overhead lights are old and in disrepair. They cast odd shadows on the wall. And, sometimes, the shadows grow eyes. As Henry passes one office door, it creaks open. A pair of eyes peers out for barely a moment, and then the door slams shut.

There is nowhere Henry does not feel watched. Even muffled, the constant ticking of the Clock rattles his bones.

Henry walks to a blank office door that he somehow knows is the right one. He reaches his hand out to turn the knob and go inside. From within, there is the humming of cooling fans and your gentle digital murmurs.

Fear courses through Henry all of a sudden, sending his hand spasming away from the handle.

“Let me see,” Henry demands in a frustrated whisper. “Let me in. I need to know.”

But you are suddenly icy-cold terrified of letting him in, of letting him see you. He can’t be allowed to know, he can’t be allowed to see. (This is a new emotion, too: shame.) The cadence of the clicks and beeps grows as Henry's fingers meet the handle of the door. He tries to grasp it, to grasp at this half-dream, to see inside where he ardently believes that, at last, there will be answers.

Henry’s fingers pass right through, and the dream dissolves.

…

Henry shoots awake and sits up in bed, panting. He shakes off the dream — such a strange dream — as if he can still feel the crawling eyes and viscous shadows. What was that? Where was I?

No answer is forthcoming. Henry brings his hands up to rub the sleep from his eyes. He grumbles, snuffles, sighs, and then lets his hands fall back onto his lap. It’s early morning, only the first light caresses of dawn filter through Ash’s window, falling on the cello and the sheet music scattered on the floor.

There’s something off about his hands. He blinks, remembering how he’d ripped the bandages from his hand at some indeterminate point in the night. Even in the darkness, Henry can see enough. He has one moment to process the situation. He thinks: oh god, my hand is rotting.

Then, he screams. He thrusts his hand out and shakes it violently, which only serves to tug at the still-healing bite-marks. The movement jostles Ash, breathing gently beside him. At the shrill noise of Henry’s shock, Ash’s face cringes and they blink into wakefulness.

“Whazzat?!” Ash lurches up, arms flailing out as though to ward off an intruder. “What’s going on?”

“Get it off, get it off, get it off,” Henry yelps, shaking his hand violently.

“What? What, what’s happened?” Ash demands, more loudly now, fully awake. Thinking, perhaps, that Henry is being attacked by a bug (a normal, bug-sized bug), Ash reaches out and deftly catches Henry’s flailing hand. Henry tries to pull away (not from Ash, but from his own hand). Ash looks down on it, processing, and then practically throws Henry’s hand to the ground with a yelp of their own.

Henry and Ash examine Henry’s hand as though it is a foreign object, lying on the sheep-print bedsheets between them.

“Oh, fuck,” Ash murmurs, because Henry’s hand is different now.

The darkness that crawled up his veins and soothed his pain has not subsided. On his wrist, it stands out like a faded tattoo; as though someone has injected tar along the lines of his veins beneath his top layer of pale, thin skin. But that’s not all: the darkness follows Henry’s veins like a web across the back of his hand until it reaches the puncture wounds. There, the tar spills out and over the surface of Henry’s hand, forming a new top layer of shiny, void-like flesh, covering all the way across his palm and up his fingertips. Henry’s first thought was not far off: the new flesh looks decayed, or perhaps burned. As Ash rotates Henry’s hand in the dim light, his flesh has a cool-toned iridescence, as though carved from obsidian. It throws off cold shades of navy and emerald and deep purple. The hand is a blemish on reality, as though someone dipped it in the night sky.

“Does it hurt?” Ash asks in a panic. “When did this happen?”

“N-no,” Henry says tremulously. “Doesn’t hurt. Um, except the— the puncture wounds. But that’s a normal, um, a normal hurt?”

“It looks like—”

“I know what it looks like,” Henry snaps, curling his hand into his own chest protectively. “It’s— it’s like the Scout.”

“The bug?”

“Yeah.”

“Why d’you keep calling it a ‘Scout’?”

“I don’t know.”

Henry and Ash fall silent. They are both sat up in Ash’s bed, the covers pooling at their waists, Henry’s hands clutched protectively against his chest, Ash’s curled in their lap.

“Sorry,” Henry says. Ash frowns.

“You’re… changing.”

“Gee, you think?” Henry spits back. “Was the— the loss of control not clear enough? The fucking weird-ass bug crawling up our window? The salt and the silver and— and—”

Henry rubs his other hand over the blackened one. It looks charred, almost. Like it should be brittle. Under his touch, however, his skin is as warm and squishy as ever. That, at least, hasn’t changed.

Ash, evidently trying to make up for the previous conversation, gingerly takes Henry’s new, night-sky hand and holds it.

“It, um, it still feels like you?” Ash observes. They squeeze the fingers and rotate them this way and that, examining the iridescence of Henry’s new flesh. “At least, underneath.”

Henry gulps. “I’m still— I’m still me underneath, too,” Henry says, although he’s quite sure who he is trying to reassure more. “I think.”

Ash offers Henry a small smile, and Henry feels his spine relax. He’s still here, still in their home, still has his friends.

“’Course you are,’” Ash replies. And then they pat the pillow, and Henry lies back down. “Come on, then, we still have a couple hours before we have to get up. Maybe it’ll even be gone by morning.”

…

It is not gone by morning. That realization is marginally less of a shock, however. Henry wakes, sees his hand, and squeezes his eyes shut. The bed is empty, and he can make out the gentle rumbles of Ash and Naomi chatting downstairs.

Naomi, the most level-headed of the three, does not panic when Henry sheepishly shows her his hand.

“Ah,” she says. “Well, that sure is something, isn’t it? Hm.”

She seizes Henry’s hand none too gently and examines it. First, she peers at the puncture wounds.

“These are healing up nicely,” Naomi reports. “Not that I’m an expert or anything. But, I mean, it’s not like an expert would know what to make of this… this pavement-looking crap that seems to have come out of the wounds.”

“Well… that’s… something,” Henry says, unimpressed. The inky void-like substance that now coats his skin still disturbs him. More than his own will being taken away, more than voices in his head, this physical manifestation of the weirdness that has latched onto him turns his stomach in a nervous flip-flop. There’s no hiding it, now, and no escaping it.

“Mm,” Naomi agrees. She rubs her fingers against his. “Interesting.”

Henry lets out a shrill giggle. “Interesting. Yep. That sure is… one word for it.”

“I would like to run some tests on this,” Naomi announces, dropping Henry’s hand. She turns back to buttering some toast.

“Oh, great,” Henry says, rolling his eyes. “More tests.”

“Not like the ones we did yesterday,” Naomi explains. “I— I may have seen something like this before. In experiments, with Professor Wilkins. If you’d like, you could come back with me to the physics lab? Wilkins likely isn’t in today; it’s Sunday, after all.”

“Don’t you think Henry should go see a doctor?” Ash interjects. “About his injuries? And what about that— that bug creature, shouldn’t we, I dunno, call someone?”

“Who would you call?” Naomi asks placidly. She takes a dainty bite of her buttered toast.

“I don’t know!” Ash bursts out. “I-I mean, we have a broken window, we were stalked by some kind of bug creature, Henry’s slowly turning into void, and—! I guess! I! Just! Think! We! Should! Call! Someone!”

“Ash,” Henry sighs. Ash’s face is going steadily pink with their frustration. They huff and wrench the fridge open. The force of it dislodges a squeeze bottle of brown sauce, which falls to the ground and opens, squirting across the floor.

“Fuck,” Ash curses. They slam the fridge shut and rip out a piece of kitchen roll, and then kneel and, exceedingly calmly, wipe up the sauce.

“I do agree that calling someone might be a good idea,” Naomi says around another bite of toast. “But… really, who would that be?”

“We could call Seonjae?” Henry suggests. “The lab tech?”

Ash scoffs. “Isn’t she the one who did this to you?”

“We don’t know what they did to me,” Henry replies evenly. “And I’m seeing her — or Dr. Pembroke, I suppose — tomorrow for a check-up anyway.”

“It could be good to speak with this Seonjae person,” Naomi says, “Outside of the context of your check-ups, I mean. She might be more forthcoming.”

“I could call her,” Henry says. Ash frowns. “Unless you have a better idea, Ash?”

“No, I— I don’t,” Ash says. “I just… I just hate that all of this is happening.”

Henry smiles at them. “I know. Me too. But we press on, you know? Keep ticking along.”

Naomi snorts. “That’s something my mum used to say.”

Henry and Ash exchange a glance.

“Is it?” Ash asks.

“Yeah,” Naomi says. She takes another sip of her tea.

“You don’t talk much about your mum,” Henry prompts.

Naomi becomes suddenly deeply interested in the broken cap of the brown sauce bottle. She fiddles it in her fingers, clicking and unclicking it.

Henry opens his mouth to prompt her again, but he feels Ash’s leg press against his thigh. Henry glances across at Ash, and they shake their head minutely. Ash and Henry sit in silence for a few agonizingly long seconds, until Henry is practically bursting at the seams. Henry and Ash are chatterboxes, always ready to overshare and fill any silence. Naomi is quiet and thoughtful. This is, perhaps, why the two of them often feel like they don’t know her nearly as well. They certainly don’t know why she puts up with them.

Finally, Naomi has gathered her thoughts.

“She’s the… the reason why I got into all this… physics, stuff,” Naomi begins.

“Oh, is she a physicist?” Henry asks immediately.

Ash clomps down on Henry’s foot.

“Ow! What, Ash?”

Ash shoots Henry a tight look. Naomi rolls her eyes fondly, but doesn’t let it deter her.

“No, nothing like that. She just— we live near a forest, you know? One of those old-old ones. And lots of, er, odd things happen in the villages near forests.”

“Did something odd happen to you?” Ash asks, recognition flaring in their expression.

The corners of Naomi’s mouth turn up, for just a moment. “Not exactly. I rather think that most of the other folks in our village… I think it’s more that they thought of us, my mum especially, as one of those… odd things.”

“…oh,” Ash says.

“Our house is full of, er, you know, crystals and bundles of herbs, and the like. She— she runs a little store in town. Sells her crystals and herbs, occult stuff, you know? It’s— she’s— she’s a psychic. Or, well, that’s how she markets herself to tourists. The other folks in our village call her a witch, or— some less nice terms. She’d prefer the term Wiccan.”

“Oh,” Henry echoes. Suddenly, Naomi’s reaction to the supernatural makes some sense. It’s not a full picture, not yet, but it’s a glimpse. Naomi is a tough nut to crack, she must have desperately wanted to share even this little tidbit.

Naomi’s eyes flick up to Henry, and then to Ash. She assesses their responses. When she finds them suitably uninclined to be assholes about the whole thing, she presses on.

“Anyway,” Naomi shifts abruptly and sets down her tea. “I don’t really practice Wicca myself, and I don’t— I didn’t really believe in any of that. But she claimed to have, er, premonitions? Visions of another world. Load of bollocks, of course, but… it inspired me, you know? I started reading about other worlds, the fae realm, that sort of thing. And then I had a physics teacher in school, she was great. Mrs. O’Shea. She saw what I was reading and that I wasn’t bad at all the math stuff, and leant me a book on quantum mechanics and string theory. So, even though I don’t— didn’t— believe in it, I guess it did… did lead me here. And now, well, I mean, fuck, it’d be pretty difficult not to take her more seriously.”

Visions of another world, Henry thinks with dread. A creeping sense of familiarity crawls up his spine, even though the contents of his dream the previous night have already faded from his mind.

“Wow, that’s… that’s interesting, Naomi,” Ash says. “She sounds really cool.”

“That might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about her,” Naomi replies neutrally.

“Damn, Naomi,” Henry replies. “I’m sorry. I’d like to meet her sometime.”

That pulls a grin from Naomi. “Maybe sometime. There’s— well. We had a falling-out, before I came here. But! That’s a topic for another time.” Or never, Naomi’s face clearly reads. Henry is unbelievably curious. “So. Anyway!”

Naomi pulls the extra chair out and sits at the table with Ash and Henry. She plops her chin down on her hand.

“What are we doing today?”

Immediately, Henry feels your influence begin to take hold.

“Oh, no.”

“What?”

“If you—  are you about to give me some options?”

Naomi examines him with curiosity. “I… was. Why, are you…?”

“…yep,” Henry confirms.

“Goddammit,” Ash groans. Henry agrees. It feels, to Henry, like fending off a headache. He grimaces and tries to block out the sensation, as though ignoring it will make it go away.

“Sorry, Hen,” Ash apologizes. “That wasn’t at you, that was directed at them.”

Right. Of course.

“There’s no way you can, um, re-direct it? At some other thing?”

Henry shakes his head. The pressure is building, and he knows you will take him over momentarily. Guilt that you are about to derail his day with his friends (as though he had any choice in the matter) wells up within him.

Henry finds his eyes drawn to his hand. He flexes his fingers. Then, all of a sudden, Ash’s warm fingers find their way between his obsidian ones. Henry’s head snaps up, and Ash and Naomi are both smiling at him.

“Well,” Naomi says, “I reckon I’d better ask them then, right?”

She turns to you.

“Er, hello,” She says. “Since you’re not going to let Henry decide this, anyway, I was wondering— would you be willing to come to the lab with me today, or would you rather give Seonjae a call?”

Poll 

Image Description: A screenshot of a poll at the bottom of a Patreon post, with two options. Option One —  Meet up with Seonjae. Option Two — Go with Naomi to the Physics Lab. Initializing... Polling... Twenty-two percent, Meet up with Seonjae. Seventy-eight percent, go with Naomi to the physics lab. We have chosen to go with Naomi to the physics lab.

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Points of Articulation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International License. It is written and created by Hannah Semmelhack, with beta-reading by Fiona Clare.