nadiathesaint | Concussion dreaming fun (Monday morning while at the clinic)

Halfway through a dream reliving the events of the weekend, Nadia's dreams changed. One moment she was being taped up and beaten by her friends. The next she was watching as someone else was tortured in a different way.

It was a monstrous, furred, ape of a creature, its dark blue hair spiked in tufts over its body. Despite its animalistic appearance, there was a keen intelligence in its feral eyes as it looked down over the crowds of people in the pens.

It wasn't focusing on them, though. Not at the moment. Its attention was on a man, hairless and strapped into a nightmarish machine. It was speaking, telling the man that, while his genetic code wasn’t nearly as attractive as the Summers', it "would do, for now". The creature flipped a switch or pressed a button on the machine, and the man cried out and then there was another, hairless, but not strapped down, stumbling to his knees beside the machine and that was when Nadia recognized him.

"Jamie!"

Neither of him seemed to hear as the original continued to scream and more and more duplicates appeared and fell and were picked back up by each other, dressed in robes, and sent forth. They surrounded her on all sides, their expressions blank and staring, until she couldn’t see the monster or the pens or the original, just a sea of robed men.

"Jamie, please,"

As one, they spoke: "We are the Madri."

"I don't understand."

"We serve the dark beast," said one. "We serve the Apocalypse," said another.

Nadia shuddered, then pushed her way through the Madri, searching for the original. He was older, here. A grown man. And she knew what this was--she was dreaming again. This might happen to her roommate, and she had to find him, the real him, and warn him.

The sea of Madri slowly thinned until she pushed out the other side into the entrance hall of the American History Museum. She recognized it from her trip to Washington DC.

It hadn't quite looked like this, then. Pamphlets and audio guides were strewn across the floor from the fight that raged all around her.

Jamie vs. Jamie. Half wore green business suits, half worse what was possibly the dumbest blue spandex outfit Nadia had ever seen, that covered their entire bodies. A yellow X decorated each blue-suited Jamie's forehead, seeming, to her, to say "aim here!" As the Jamies hit and pushed and kicked each other, more and more of him appeared to join the fight.

Nadia backed up, not wanting to get hit, and heard voices from a nearby room. She stared at the warring Jamies a moment longer, then ducked away.

It was the room of a night club, or something similar. There were only three Jamies here, for which Nadia was glad, and with them was the largest man she'd ever seen. Bigger even than the Tick. He was hunched miserably forward, the single white tuft of hair on his head drooping forward towards his dark, opaque goggles. One of the Jamies sat just as sullenly by his feet, looking ill. One stood a distance away, his back to them, staring out the window. One stood just next to the large man, grinning.

"Don't worry so much, Guido!" that Jamie said cheerfully. "Have a little fun, alright?"

The large man, Guido, the guy who'd apparently changed Jamie's application so it read "female", looked up at Nadia, his expression stricken. "He doesn't know. He's dying and he has no idea." He looked down at the sickly Jamie, who'd seemed to have hunched into himself even more. "It's the Legacy."

Nadia shook her head. These Jamies, like the others she'd seen, were all much older than the one she knew in Fandom. "When? When does this happen? How do I stop it?"

"It's too late for that," said the Jamie by the window. "Don't worry so much."

The door behind Nadia burst inward, spilling dozens--hundreds--of Jamies, green suited, blue suited, robed, into the room, until she couldn't see the walls and she couldn't see Guido and that guy was like eight feet tall, so that was a whole lot of Jamies. She stood on her toes, trying to find the original one, and was knocked into from behind to the floor.

As the stampede of Jamies spilled over her, stepping on her arm, her ribs, her head, she caught sight of the blue thing, sitting in the rafters. Laughing.