Claudia: Dreams of war, dreams of liars
Aug. 26th, 2012 10:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
“I’m not finding anything yet!”
Leena sounded panicked, which she was. Mrs. Frederic, infuriatingly, was as calm as ever. “Keep looking. Something’s got to neutralize that bomb.”
Claudia worked with nearly single-minded speed, fingers flying over the keys while artifact entries scrolled past, her eyes flicking over each one without focusing on any of them, trusting her mind to grasp the answer when it appeared while a part of her was horribly, dreadfully aware of the countdown in the corner of the screen. “Can’t find anything in the database, either,” she said almost absently. At zero, an artifact bomb of unknown strength would go off inside the Warehouse and there was a good chance the only father she’d ever had would die. Beside her, Leena flipped pages frantically while across the table, Mrs. Frederic leafed through books at the first un-unhurried speed she’d ever seen the Caretaker move with.
“Okay, so why can’t we just go to the Warehouse and find a way to break them out, even if we can not stop the explosion?”
Now the Caretaker sounded irritated. “There’s no time, the umbilicus has been destroyed and the blast walls have blocked any exits they might reach in the time remaining, if they run.”
“I could hack my way in and release the blast walls,” the youngest of the three said, “but that still leaves the barrier and I can’t hack into that.”
“It’s derived from the Remari Shackle.” The older woman paused, gaze resting heavily on her successor. “Claudia. You’re going to have to give me back the metronome, please,” Mrs. Frederic said with a calm tone that was out of place during such a desperate – eyes flicked to the countdown – minute and twenty-seven seconds. “Now, please.”
There was authority in that tone, the tug of a not-entirely-metaphoric leash and over a century of intimidation lurking behind it. Claudia looked up and squarely into hard brown eyes accustomed to obedience.
“No.” Leena looked up, distracted from her panic by the steadiness in her friend’s voice, scared by the determination in both faces and the clash of wills that was brewing like a storm, faintly heard but as yet unseen, thunder rumbling in the distance. Silver-painted nails glinted as Claudia wrapped her right hand around the top of the wooden pyramid, feeling the thin, cold needle beneath her thumb. “The metronome is for Steve.” Because she wouldn’t let herself think that Artie might need it more, that Leena was the only one who likely hadn’t touched the Phoenix, that there could be greater tragedies than the body of her friend lying in the entryway. “I’m bringing him back.”
Mrs. Frederic met her challenging gaze with equally steady eyes and steadfast resolve while in the corner, red numbers flashed 00:57, 00:56, 00:55…
“You know we don’t use artifacts,” the older woman warned.
“I know the Regents don’t want us to use artifacts, but we do it all the time and they either don’t know or don’t enforce until it suits them,” countered Claudia. “I didn’t see Adwin Kosan protesting when Artie used artifacts to get him out of that building, and I didn’t see him chastising Pete for using the spray can to save Jane and Myka.”
Mrs. Frederic’s lips pressed into an unhappy line, and the numbers hit zero.
They felt the explosion first, a burning, tearing sensation like heartburn from hell crossed with a chestburster. Then came the shockwave that rattled dishes, windows, and everything not nailed down. Leena braced herself on the table, but the other two were nearly knocked from their chairs. Then came the draining. The Warehouse was dead. Mrs. Frederic fell to the floor, hair crumbling and flesh sinking as the years reclaimed her, and Claudia felt the world grow dark as everything she was began spilling out. The fingers that had been so tight around the metronome loosened, and her limp thumb pushed the needle out of position through sheer dead weight before her hand fell to the table.
Tick.
The draining stopped, suddenly, and it was like being plunged into a pool of icy water.
Tock.
A reversal, like a hose to the face while driving seventy down a deserted highway on Steve McQueen’s motorbike.
Tick.
Claudia’s heart, which had only been vaguely attempting to keep its rhythm, settled into a steady beat again…albeit a slower one than she was used to.
Tock.
Lungs spasmed, sucking in air like they’d just remembered it was a thing they should be doing.
Tick.
The world returned in a blinding rush, and she found Leena holding her up, frantic.
“I’m okay! I’m okay!” Weakly, still half-blind, she batted at the hands holding her until her balance came back.
“Mrs. Frederic’s gone!”
“So’s the Warehouse.” And Artie, but she couldn’t think about that yet.
NO!
In the dark, in her bed, Claudia sat up and felt sweat cooling on her skin. What the hell kind of nightmare was that? It wasn’t enough she had to have nightmares of Steve being dead? And why in the name of anything did her subconscious decide to throw in that part about the bomb going off and her using the metronome? Was bringing Steve back that intense of an experience that she couldn’t deal with it any other way? Absently, she rubbed at her chest, remembering what it had felt like to have her tie to the Warehouse shut down like that.
The ytterbium chamber’s been destroyed, Artie’s voice whispered in her mind, a fragment of dream she hadn’t gotten to, or one she’d blocked out. Leena answered him, Pandora’s Box? Gone, he confirmed grimly.
Shuddering, Claudia leaned over her bed and fished out the box containing the most decrepit, creepy plush animal she’d ever seen. Her old nightmare-eater, the monster under her bed, was motionless. Disney’s brush wore off again. Well, it was better than nothing. She cuddled The Thing That Will Bite desperately while half-formed thoughts of Artie’s nonfunctional pocket watch drifted around, stopwatches and stopped time and black diamonds. Poking around in some wine cellar in France, circumnavigation being the answer to…something…and some Bible verse? For a second, she fished at numbers and almost had them, but they slipped away and all she could remember was wanting to giggle at 420 almost being the answer but that would be morning, not afternoon.
TTTWB cradled in one hand, she slipped out of bed and grabbed her laptop, powering it up as she padded downstairs. The living room was dark, not that had ever stopped her, and she curled up at one end of the couch. The laptop logged automatically into the Warehouse systems, but nothing was wrong, so the window minimized. Time to do the google.
Bible verses 16:20. Nothing but Romans, nothing to see there. 16:19. Keys to the kingdom of heaven, blah blah blah. 16:18. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock... Claudia's blood turned to ice and suddenly, there was no air in her lungs. ...on this rock I will build my church. It's in the Vatican. That made no sense. What was in the Vatican?
Quickly, she opened up a new document and jotted down everything she could remember or speculate about her crazy nightmare. Random dream crap, she could deal with, laugh off, or ignore. But when random dream crap included googleable things, it was time to worry. Was she the only one getting these dreams? Were they dreams? Should she bring this to Mrs. Frederic right away, or wait until she had more evidence that something had...
...something had...
Artie was good with artifacts, but he'd realized awful fast that they needed Ghandi's dhoti to neutralize that bomb. There was no flustering, no thinking out loud, no attempts at even considering other artifacts. And, most damning, there was no explanation afterwards as to why he'd decided on that particular artifact. Artie loved explaining. And he hadn't protested her wanting to use the metronome to bring Steve back, even going so far as to say he was "sure there weren't any negative effects". Had he been unusually concerned for her well-being or relieved that she had survived her brush with Marcus Diamond?
Fingers flicked over the keyboard. Evidence be damned, something was wrong and she needed to know she wasn't the only one who knew it. In some corner of her mind, she grinned at how Pete and Myka would flip if they knew Mrs. Frederic had - and used - an email address, much less that little no-field-work-for-you Claudia had a direct line to the Caretaker. Then, not so much as an afterthought but more as the first step in a guerrilla war, she checked the Warehouse systems. Artie was asleep, and there was nothing unusual in the logs. Not that that meant anything. Claudia dug deeper, looking at the access logs for the logs. No fudged entries, no covered tracks. She set up a subroutine to log all activities made with Artie's login and checked her email, half expecting no reply and half expecting one because it was Mrs. Frederic.
There was an email, a reply to hers. Tell no one your suspicions until we have talked, read the response. Fine. She could do that. Then, as she watched, a second one appeared. I had the nightmare, too.
Right. Claudia resolutely pulled up a project tangled and complex enough that she'd been letting it gather virtual dust and pulled the blanket off the back of the couch, wrapping it around her and TTTWB. Mrs. Frederic had had the same nightmare about the Warehouse being destroyed. Of all the frightening or unsettling shit she'd seen and experienced in her twenty years, that won hands down and she would not be sleeping again until probably tomorrow night.
And as soon as everyone else was awake and the day had gotten underway, she was borrowing Disney's brush to touch up her nightmare monster.
=========================
"That's TiTi," Leena exclaimed with a combination of glee and wariness as she entered the room, raising blinds. "I haven't seen him in forever. You haven't needed him in forever."
"Nightmare that Sykes's bomb went off," Claudia said shortly, not looking up from the web of data she was spinning.
Leena shuddered. "Chocolate chip pancakes? Sounds like you could use all the comfort you can get."
"I'm not going to argue with that. If Artie calls before he comes over, tell him to bring Disney's paintbrush?"
The older girl leaned in to hug Claudia through the blanket. "You got it."
While breakfast was cooking, Myka wandered downstairs and did a double-take. "Claud? Is that a stuffed animal?"
"No," she said absently. "It's a nightmare-eating monster. It lives under my bed."
Undeterred, she drifted closer. "He's cute."
"He's scary."
"Is he a bear?"
"He's a monster."
"What's his name?"
Claudia sighed. Eyes rolling, she saved her work and said, "The Thing That Will Bite."
"That's not a very friendly name," Myka said in mild affront.
From the stairs, Pete called, "Enter Sandman?"
Save complete, the files and programs closed. "You got it."
Myka looked back and forth between them. "What am missing?"
That was an opening Pete did not intend to let slip. "Dreams of war," he sang, playing air guitar, "dreams of liars, dreams of dragonsfire! And of things that will bi-ite, yeah!"
"Sleep with one eye open," Claudia picked up when he was content to let the moment pass. "Gripping your pillow tight! Exit light, enter night."
Gleefully, he slid across the floor and joined in for the last line. "Take my hand, we're off to Never Never Land! ...hey Claud, that is one gnarly little dude. Where'd you get him?"
"Artie gave him to me," she said, cheered. Pete had always accepted her and treated her as an equal. "When I first came here. Painted him with Disney's brush so I'd have a monster to live under my bed and eat my nightmares."
The man who was like an older brother to her looked wistful and mildly envious. "Man, I sure could have used one of those after my dad died. I'm guessing you had dreams about Steve?"
"What about me?" he called as he rattled down the stairs.
"No dead jokes," Claudia threatened, clutching TTTWB tighter. "I got about three hours of sleep and I can't deal with them today."
Instantly, the amusement drained from his face and he brushed past the other two to sit beside her on the couch and pull her into a hug. "Claud, what happened?"
"Worst-case scenario nightmares," she said shortly, not fighting the hug.
"Well, I've got something that ought to keep you distracted. No one reported Sykes dead."
The possibilities spread before her in glorious, tantalizing splendor. "Jinksy, you always know what to say to make a girl feel better."
=========================
Halfway through a stack of chocolate chip pancakes, Artie bustled in. He didn't say a word until he'd pulled Claudia out of her chair into a fierce, tight embrace and then let her go back to her breakfast.
"Uh, I saw TiTi on the...couch. If I'd known..."
She shook her head. "Just let me borrow the brush later?"
"Of course, of course." Awkwardly, he shuffled jacket and bag until he could sit at the table and avoid the curious eyes of the other three by playing with an english muffin. "Do you want to talk about it? L-later?"
Well, she did and she didn't. Hesitantly, she looked up at him, quickly analyzing his expression before she said, "I had a nightmare the bomb went off." Was that guilt? Knowing horror, or just sympathetic horror? She let herself remember that burning, draining darkness for just a moment. "And I died."
Relief. A single grain of relief smothered under fatherly concern. He knew. Something did happen, it wasn't just a dream. Quickly, she buried her gaze in her breakfast and stuffed a third of a pancake in her mouth.
"So who's Tee-Tee," Pete asked shamelessly, "and is she related to titty and tata?"
Artie rolled his eyes. "It's a nickname for her monster. The Thing That Will Bite is kind of a mouthful, and T-T-T-W-B isn't much better."
This was all news to Steve and his eyebrows would have been in his hair if he'd had enough to hide them. "So you call it TiTi, for The Thing? Why not just 'Thing'?"
Claudia wasn't the only one giving him an incredulous look.
"Jinksy," Pete said in a dangerously casual tone, one arm around the other man's shoulders, "you just volunteered to join us for a marathon of the Addams Family movies."
=========================
Claudia was sitting on the spiraling metal stairs near where Disney's brush was shelved, painting TTTWB into a fierce but small snuffling plush monstrosity, when Mrs. Frederic was suddenly standing in front of her.
"You think something happened," she said without preamble, "and our memories of it were erased."
"Blocked," the younger woman clarified without looking up. "If they were erased, I wouldn't have had a nightmare clear enough to google and recognize Bible verses."
"Bi-" Mrs. Frederic frowned. "I think you'd better tell me everything. My dream was cut somewhat short."
Quickly, Claudia related everything she remembered and anything she suspected. France, black diamonds, circumnavigation, the Vatican, Artie's pocketwatch, and the relief he'd shown when she told him she'd died in her nightmare.
"So we are in agreement that we think the Warehouse was destroyed and the event somehow undone or overwritten." The Caretaker frowned down one aisle. "I, of course, remember nothing after that. You've given me some leads to follow, and they will have my highest priority, but without more information..." She shook her head. "I don't have to tell you to watch Artie closely. That we both remembered this could merely reflect our connection to the Warehouse, or it could be something deeper. You said no one else experienced nightmares last night?"
"If they had, they would have commiserated with me." TTTWB was done; he growled softly in her arms as she stood to replace the brush.
"Don't tell them yet. We may be worrying over nothing."
"Yeah."
Mrs. Frederic placed herself directly in Claudia's path and gently lifted her chin with one hand. "Claudia. What's bothering you? Is it that he's hiding this from us?"
She sighed. "No, I know why he didn't say anything to me. He thinks I don't remember, and what would be the point of telling me? What's bothering me is that we don't know what happened. We don't know what changed those events. And we don't know what the cost of doing that was."
"I confronted Artie," the older lady said grimly. "He denied anything, of course. Watch him, Claudia. Hint that you know, if you feel it's appropriate. And if..." she trailed off, looking distinctly unhappy. "If you judge that there is a threat, one you can't handle alone, see if MacPherson is willing to cooperate. It may become necessary to fight fire with fire."
Claudia clutched the monster to her chest, its felt teeth nipping at her neck. "You think it could come to that."
"I hope it won't. But you know as well as I do that planning for the worst isn't necessarily a bad option."
She did. That's what scared her.