(Ooc: to lessen confusion. Alex thoughts will have no marks, Jiri's = ' ', Ace = ^ ^, Mary = * *, Pick and Pocket = ~ ~, and the rest = : : )

The moment the man was dead, he gave his last bit of strength to shove him off. All he could feel was terror and panic. And the slick ooze of blood on his skin. His construct was covered the fluids of the dead man, the vipers breathing for the first time. Alex could help but sob, the sensory input was too much. God he felt sick, bathed in bloody, violent birth, the putrid smell of rot invading his senses.

He wanted to scream. This isn't fair! I don't deserve this!

He was crying when the police arrived, trying to put pressure on his wound. Body trembling to follow their demands. He cut off his connection to the constructs leaving them to dissolve into dirt. He raised one hand, keeping the other on his wound.

"Please, he stabbed me! I was just trying to protect myself! They were going to kill me! It was self-defense! He was going to kill me!"

Please believe me please believe me I'm not a monster I swear-

His thoughts stopped short when an unfamiliar voice cut through the others.

'Walking corpse', huh? That was a good one. Took me awhile to get it, but I totally do now. Walking corpse--ha!' the voice chuckled.

The constructs roared in confusion, clamoring to find the source of this unknown. The first to strike upon Jiri would feel hawkish in presence, all talons and protective command.

^Who are you?!^

Alex could only sit there in shock, eyes wide and face tear soaked. God he didn't need a break down now of all times. He'd leave the contructs to sort out, right now he needed to focus on making sure he didn't get shot.

This was a spikey-in-the-brain dream. All prickle-like and shouting.

Me? Jiri replied, with a faint disbelief that his new host would be able to feel. I am your creator. Absolute certainty radiated from this statement. He was the one who had dreamed them into being, the one who would still be there in the morning, when his eyes opened and the light streamed in. As the thugs had so kindly addressed him, he was 'oh god.'

And you, Sir, Jiri didn't eye the speaker up. There was no sight inside the teen's head. But if there was a mental equivalent for giving a tasting lick, that's what Jiri did. You, I shall dub Feathers.

Outside the teen's head, the cops seemed perfectly content to keep their distance as they waited for the mutant handlers to arrive. The one pointing the gun kept up a steady stream of, "Just stay down, we'll sort things out at the station, do not use your powers or I am authorized to shoot in self-defense by Article 3 Section 5 of the Duskmoor Preventative Act--"

In his dream, the teen felt panicky sick faint confused.

Don't worry, Jiri crooned into his cranium, This would be a lame dream if the victim got shoot. Check it out, the bus is still here, right? The driver said he had cameras. They'll show what happened.

If you don't bleed out waiting for them to arrest you, he added it, with good cheer.

All the constructs reacted in various ways, from giggle fits to abject horror and anger. Ace was upfront about his aggression, mind like a knife attempting to cut out the intruder.

^You are no such thing! Who are you?! Why must you intrude on him, on us?!^

*Oh Ace, this one's untethered. Do you feel it? He's free.*

Jiri would feel another construct purring at his back, soft fur and deadly claws. All want and take and jealousy. She was jealous of Jiri, jealous of how he could so easily slip into someone else's mind.

^Mary, it's dangerous. It's not the time for this.^

*It's now more the time than ever, this ship might sink, taking us with it.*

And she continued to purr, claws scrapping along Jiri's being. Even as he spoke to Alex directly, promising he would be alright. But they could all feel it, they're real creator was close to passing out. The red life fluid seeping out to quickly. What veins had been hit? How deep was the cut? They couldn't tell, but it was dangerously close to death.

Alex was barely listening to the cop, trying to relay to them what happened instead before he bit the big one. "Please, I've been stabbed, I-I need to go to the hospital, I'm bleeding, I've been stabbed, help me...help me...help..." His voice slurred, bright lights seemed to be all that he saw, he pitched forward and then, darkness.

He met the intruder inside a desert home, with barred windows and too many locks on the door. He hadn't been here in ages. "Did I die?"

Why must he intrude? Jiri responded as any god might: Because I can, Feathers. Because. I. Can.

Feathers was all angry hedgehog prickles. He could hear others, all around, some laughing, some not, like a circus tent just before the lights raised and the show began. All was dark inside, and growing dark outside. Jiri stopped paying attention to what the teen saw: it seemed depressing, and the dream had moved on to more interesting things, anyway.

Like the sort-of-almost presence that brushed past him, curled around him, rubbed smooth soft fur against his arms even though she didn't have fur and he didn't have arms. He felt her wrap around him, like dark wrapped a forest at dusk.

Claws brushed against the heart of him, claws he knew were as real as he was even if that was a loaded phrase, in this place where each of them touched with no body, spoke with no voice. It sent shivers up his spine, to that reptilian part of the brain that evolved when men were still prey.

Ooo, Jiri cooed, I like you. Mary Mary quite contrary. You are a goddess, aren't you?

He wrapped an arm over her neck and sunk his face into her fur, or the equivalent thereof in this place.

Poor trapped goddess, why don't you free yourself? This boy isn't half as strong as you.

They all listened as the teen gibbered his way down into the darkness.

---

Jiri was waiting, in the house with the wood floor and the dust in the air, in the place with too many locks. He was himself again, and no one else--a scrawny teenager, mostly middle eastern in appearance, but with his mother's green eyes. His clothes were simple, white, not something he'd really wear. But they seemed to fit the austerity of the setting.

He sat at a table. He wanted tea: chai tea, proper chai tea, like he'd drunk with his father's family in Iran. A porcelain cup appeared in his hands, steaming, the spiced smell just as he remembered. Around the cup's edges, in blue paint, a hawk chased snakes chased rats chased bugs chased a mountain lion chased a hawk, round and round. He was a god. Making a little tea appear was nothing.

He blew over the top of his cup, and met the teen's eyes with simple curiosity. "What would happen if we opened those locks? Are they meant to keep things out, or in?"

Alex sat up slowly, running a hand through his short hair. No long, his hair was longer in this time, he was younger too. Fifteen it felt like. Oh, he was fully immersed in this memory this time around. God, he didn't want to think about this place. Not after everything that just happened. In the background cicadas buzzed, soft and just on the edge of thought.

To answer the stranger's question, "Not much I don't think. It's both and neither. Its just how I remember this place." He stood up and looked out the barred window, the light and the breeze feeling exactly how he remembered it. The desert looked much the same too, aside from the mound of freshly turned dirt.

"Not that they're aren't back doors everywhere in this place. The locks are pointless." A voice purred in Jiri's ear, arms with clawed hands draping themselves around him. Mary looked human enough this time, cloaked in fur and with a mouth full of pointed teeth.

Ace appeared next, hawkish as his presence implied and more animal than human. Two wings rested over his shoulders while dozens more lined his spine. "Mary, I told you to leave them be! He can't take this strain, not now!"

"I'm not dead yet?" Alex turned from the window, looking resigned to his fate.

"No you're very much alive. For how long depends on her. You need to go back to your place, Mary."Ace commanded.

"You go back, wait for the ship to sink. I want off." she growled, claws digging into Jiri.

It felt like a scene from a folktale. The sort where coyote man man from clay, and anything could happen, with no happy ending guaranteed. There was a darkness to the room, despite the sun filtering in through the boarded up windows.

"So this is a memory, for you?" Jiri asked, green eyes bright and curious over his cup of tea. Did people in dreams have memories of their own, then? And why not--everything he'd seen made it clear the boy thought he was real. Of course he would have memories. What happened to all that when Jiri himself woke? "What happened to you here?"

Familiar fur slid over his cheeks, brushing the sides of his neck, draping over his chest. He knew her without turning his head, though he did; the feel of her was the same as in the dark part of this dream. Sometimes in a dream, he just knew a thing without knowing why. It wasn't tied to shape or sight. This woman stood upright, but there was no hiding that she stalked ridges far from where men lived, and killed what she found there.

He brushed a hand against her arm. Soft fur, in shades of cream.

"And where do these back doors lead?" He asked, tilting his head back against her chest so he could look up into her face. Her teeth didn't bother him. With the quite certainty of a dreamer, he knew that if she wanted to eat him, it was simply something that would happen. And then he would dream something else.

The next voice was all prickles and high-strung exclamations. Jiri craned his head a little around Mary's arm, until he could match the personality with a face. The sight of the hawk man was like a picture of a seraphim, in the days they were drawn in all their winged glory. It was a sight to give even an ancient Persian poet pause.

Jiri summed up his esteem eloquently. "Hello, Feathers. I like your wings. Tea? Perhaps you can all tell me why you think he's dying, and what you think will happen when he does? You think you are part of him--what do you think will happen to you?"

His dreams dreamed they were another man's dream. It was really quite fascinating.

Not quite fascinating enough to distract him from the claws that pressed through his shirt, though. She was already in his head; he didn't see how he could meet her demands further.

"So this is a memory, for you? What happened to you here?"

He looked at the stranger but reply so much as the world over lapped with the memory. A flicker of shadow, a flicker of blood, bullet holes, and bodies. For a moment the air grew thinner and the sound of cicadas grew louder. Then as quickly as it appear, it receded. Like a crashing wave on the shore, there and then gone.

Mary grinned, all sharp teeth and blood. "They lead everywhere stranger, bet you could go anywhere you like. Your untethered, free, no strings to tie you to some helpless host." She watched with feral eyes as Alex sat down, the boy's expression growing younger and sadder.

"Fuck your tea intruder! Leave him be! Find another to suffer you!"Ace commanded, "Take her with you for all I care! You'll kill him!" His wings spread wide, face contorting into more bestial forms.

"She's right though, Ace. Maybe it's better if you all go..."

Ace looked back at Alex, features softening at the now crying child. 13 or 14 now, too young, repressed and scared and still trying to figure himself out. He sniffled and rushed to brush away his tears, "What use am I? I can't even save myself..."

"Easy, easy Alex. You remember when we first me, I promised to help you, protect you, you're not alone, never alone."Ace murmured soft, hands cupping Alex's face, trying to calm the fear and the worry. A flicker of memory followed, grass fields and autumn air, a heart full of pride, a boy and his hawk, with gentle claws for soft skin. A time when they had not been tested.

"Bleck, more of a dove than a hawk aren't you Ace?"Mary sneered.

Bullet holes and bodies. The scene, the impressions, came and went like a breeze from the windows.

And then the bickering continued.

"Are you speaking to me?" The tea intruder said, with a belated blink directed at the hawk. "I will dream wherever I want to, thank you. And besides, if he is real and he is dying, isn't keeping his mind active a good idea? The next best thing to keeping him awake, I'd think. For all your shouting, you really dropped the ball on that one, Feathers."

Siiiiiip. Dream tea was delicious. Somehow more so, with a lioness still draped over his shoulders. Her fur was chai mixed with milk and honey. The shades on it were fascinating, and he idly ran the fingers of one hand up and down, up and down, stroking her arm.

The boy was shrinking. Not in the physical sense, though there was that, too; in his presence, in his voice, in his being. He grew younger and younger as the hawk crooned to him, made promises that he could not keep. Another breeze of dream or memory or both drifted in through the cracks in the house, and out again. A warm sunlight-yellow breeze, the sensation of claws on skin, but not like Mary's, not like hers at all. There was something light free unburdened in it, nothing heavy enough to hold it, and it drifted out another crack and was gone.

Jiri set his tea down. He didn't like this dream anymore. He craned his head up to look into the cat's eyes. They were gold, wild, a tangled forest and a bloody night in their depths.

"I'm going to go check on things," he said, because it was his dream, and he could.

---

And he did.

"--the bleeding. Get another bag hooked up--"

It was white and very bright and sort of shaking side-to-side. Awfully cramped, beeping lights, the smell the taste of copper in the back of his mouth.

Jiri was dreaming he was one of two paramedics, in the back of a moving ambulance. The siren was loud, disorienting, he didn't realize that the woman in this dream was speaking to him at first.

"Another bag, John!"

"Oh, right. Sorry." He had already been reaching for the plastic bag, its insides full of thick red liquid. Blood. He watched as his hand picked it up, changed out an empty bag for this new one.

In the dream he felt a sudden hesitance, a sudden uncertainty, like something was wrong with him and he didn't remember what. Why did I hesitate like that? A voice in his head thought, and it wasn't Jiri.

The scrawny teen lay on a stretcher between the two paramedics, his shirt cut open, red bandages pressed to his side. One of his arms hung over the edge of the table, jostling with every bump in the round. The ambulance was slowing down now, turning, stopping. The doors opened. It was night outside, but this was a building that was open all hours.

---

Jiri was back. He didn't know how it would appear to his dream creatures: whether they would see a flicker of movement, and then he would return; whether significant time had elapsed for them; whether, as products of his mind, they wouldn't have noticed anything at all.

He came over near the boy, and leaned down, his hands on his knees. "Hey. You're at the hospital now. Remember: you won't die. It's my dream, and I don't want you to."

When he returned the room had changed, no longer a living room but a spars and locked bedroom. The windows were still barred with the outside now night but the door hung open. Alex was now laying on the bed, tucked in and dozing. Not asleep but calmer than he was before. Ace was there with him, sitting on the bed, hand pressed to the boy's forehead.

Mary lay napping in a corner, her human mask shed in favor of the real one. A mountain lion much larger that the normal type, fur decorated in swirls of cream and desert sand. Every breath she took seemed to shift the swirls with her body.

"She refused to leave until you returned. So I'll ask again, who are you?"

Ace was glaring at him, anger radiating off him. He was protective of the boy, connection far deeper than blood. The boy was creator, home, joy, such joy and pride, whose being was tangled in his own. They were one and the same, Adam born of earth and God's breath. They shared in their creators heart, Mary and him. All of them did, thus bore his traits.

He did not blame Mary for her traits, they were as much a part of her as they were of Alex. But he did blame the stranger for bringing the wrong ones out. The stranger who dared say he was the creator. The untethered one, with no body to call home. This drifter would not be allowed to settle here. Not while he had talons enough to fight.

Jiri accepted the change in surroundings, as dreamers do. It was darker now, the room they were in smaller, but the same boarded up windows around them. Outside, crickets had replaced the cicadas. They sung through the open doorway.

The teen was lying on the bed. Not torn-shirt and bleedy like the last segment of the dream, but whole. Just sleeping, or seeming too. The hawk sat by him, still looking like an avenging angel. The lioness was what she was: he had met her in the dark and he had seen her in the light, and as she slept with dreams swirling through her fur, she was unmistakable for anything other than herself.

Jiri walked to the door, and leaned against the frame, staring out into the night. A cool breeze blew through his hair. There were stars out there, more stars than you ever saw in a city.

He turned his head just enough to look at the hawk, as well as the stars. "I'm the dreamer," he said. "Who are you?"

"You keep telling her to leave. Where would she go?"

The hawk's anger wasn't lost on him. But it was really a beautiful, peaceful night. He liked this part of the dream. It was hardly worth getting flustered over a bird.

"A dreamer...I've been called Ace." It rung of childish thoughts, boyhood thought of what might be a cool name to name an animal. The name made the angry features of him soften, almost look fond. It was a name given before he knew what he was, was aware of the world around them and his place in it.

At the second question, "Back to her place. To the spot she had claimed as her own. She would not be uncomfortable there, it is her's after all. Yet she insists on roaming, forcing her way into places she does not belong. She wakes the others, brings them forward when out creator tries something she doesn't like. But he suffers her, rather than let Swarm swallow her whole as he should."

He sighs and watches the sky with him. "I fear she's come to enjoy our fights and chases."

The sky is brilliant and bright with far more stars than there should be. More a feeling of how the world was in that time than an accurate account.

"Ace, huh?" Jiri tried the name out on his tongue. It was crisp and sharp; it fit the fleeting dream-in-dream he'd seen earlier, of the boy and the hawk and the sunny field. "I'll admit, that's a little more dignified than Feathers." His grin was cheeky, but a friendly kind of cheeky.

"Is this your place, then?" He asked, looking at the interior again. It was... sparse. "I wouldn't have pegged you for it. You seem more like a guy who belongs out there." He tilted his chin briefly, back outside, back to the starlight sky.

His eyes flicked to the sleeping cat, and the corners of his mouth twitched. "Is her place full of dead things? Or things that squeal when you hunt them?" He got the impression, somehow, that she liked a bit of reaction in her prey.

He couldn't help but grin at the hawk's sigh. "Careful. One day you might wake up and realize you enjoy the fights and the chases, too. She seems like quite the lady."

He tried to find constellations he recognized, but the stars wouldn't sit still as his eyes roved over them, like trying to read in a dream. "So why can't you guys leave?" He asked.

"My place...it's the mountains where we spent our youth and the fields of my creation."he said wistfully, full of nostalgia and an ache for freedom. Oh how many lands must they have wondered, the sights they've seen. "Alex, he enjoys these places too, they are as much his home as they are mine."

He glanced over at Mary and frowned. "Yes, she does have a love of hunting. Says if she can not gnaw her teeth on something's bones, then her teeth are liable to grow through her skull. A lie I imagine she made to garner pity from out creator...Hardly a lady, but she is fond you think of her like that."

The mention of their comings and goings made him smile. "Oh we can leave but we have nobodies to go to. We could possibly expire with out a tether to hold us down. So the choice is left to Alex. He can only let so many of us roam free at a time. Mary requires bigger bodies, lest she claw up Alex's mind in a fit of anger. As you can imagine she doesn't get to leave often. Thus she think our creator a warden and this a prison."

"Alex?" Jiri glanced back to the teen on the bed. So that was his name. He closed his eyes, picturing the scene Ace was painting. "It sounds like a nice place. Nice that you have a way to go back, even if everything is screwed up now."

The hawk hadn't explicitly stated it, but his voice, his words--there was no reason to yearn for the past unless something had broken, something had stopped them from going back. Jiri could relate. But then, of course he could. This--this whole thing--this was his brain trying to sort through what had been happening to him. That's what dreams were, weren't they?

He leaned more heavily against the door frame. "It's because he's a mutant that you can't go back, right?" Of course it was. He was just talking to a projection of his own psyche, here. He had to be.

If he wasn't, if what he'd seen tonight, what he'd done tonight was real--

It was a dream, just a dream. Stars like that didn't really exist. They were just memory stars, an image of something bright that had never really been there.

His lips quirked as the hawk continued. "A lady like that?" He said. "They're the most dangerous kind to not call a lady."

He grew still as Ace talked about their predicament--minds, but no bodies. No where to go. It sounded familiar, though twisted, almost reversed.

Was this it? Was this were his brain opened up, and all the secrets of his power got shaken lose from his subconscious?

"What do you do when there are bodies?" He barely dared to glance at the man. He barely breathed, afraid he'd wake up before his sleeping mind had a chance to answer him. "How do you move into them? How do you control that? How do you stop it?"

"It's because he's a mutant that you can't go back, right?"

Ace looked down at the boy, worry for him evident and not just for his own sake. "That's part of it yes. The past holds no place for us. We're still looking. Looking for home. A place so we won't be adrift any more."

The scene fuzzed, jerking like a scratched disc. There was something horrendously wrong. Alex groaned on the bed, curling up tighter into a ball. Ace didn't seem to notice his question, his focus instead on tending to the boy. The crickets outside grew louder, beeping loudly as the scene, skipped and jumped and wavered.

Outside the stars had gone dark and there was no more breeze, just dead air.

-

Outside his mind, his body was seizing, nurses struggled to keep him pinned. They watched his vitals, searching for a reason to the sudden fit. But the wound had nothing to do with the brain and the only conclusion they could come to was wait. Wait and watch and hope they didn't end up with a dead mutant kid on their hands.

They didn't want another riot to result from this. It had been years since the last one, but nobody wanted a return to that time. Not when so much harm had come from it.