driftfleet | CLOSED // wake me up, before you echo

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CLOSED // wake me up, before you echo

Who: Sam Winchester and Katie McCoy
Broadcast: N/A
Action: Closed.
When: Sometime around 3/12/17.

Sam has finally ran into a wall with his echo problems. A big spiked wall, full of shark teeth.

How was he supposed to know that taking in the soul of a changeling kid was going to thoroughly wreck him? Well, he's a Winchester, so it would've somehow backfired sooner or later anyway. But it's been what feels like a lifetime since Adstringendum (of course it wasn't, but it was all over with, wasn't it? Marked off the To Do List of escaping and it being a memory now). And he had never thought this place would only make the strange side-effects even worse. He'd told Katie he'd deal with it, make due, not jump to any sort of potentially dangerous solutions yet, for whatever fragment of soul she'd left inside him.

But in the bar, the strange hallucinations surrounding Nami finally attacked. Sharkman — Arlong — chomped right down on his shoulder.

He knows from experience, he gave the thing too much power.

And even though he can't... see anything wrong with the shoulder at the moment, he knows something wrong did happen.

So. He's going to call the source of this and try to fix what he'd been weakly adamant not to touch yet.

Voice feed — ring, ring, friend.

"Katie? I need, um. I need help."

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Because that's always a good start to a conversation.

She doesn't ask what he needs help with. Not with that stutter in his request. She rolls over, dislodging one of the foxes to pick up her comm and squint at it, but when she finally answers, it's to the point.

"Where are you?"

"On the Iskaulit, moving back toward the teleporters."

He touches a hand to his shoulder. He swears, he saw it. He felt it.

He swears, man, it was fucking real for a second there; he gets a concerning flash back to Lucifer, to him almost murdering him, Cas, everyone. He'd thought keeping tabs on it and just handling it as it goes was the best choice; now he's not so sure.

He holds his breath for a moment, looking at the comm device.

"... One of the echoes interacted with me."

"That's a very clinical way of putting it." Mild observation. It had to happen eventually.

"Turn around. You're getting colder. You know, it's wonderful how it manages to snow all the time in the fox park here? Rather magical, really."

She dusts the snow off her jeans as she stands, trudging back out of the foxes' domain. She'll meet him halfway, most likely.

He turns, starts moving toward the other direction with a little urgency.

He knows he's hurt, but he's not — not really, right? But if the echoes flash back in his vision again, is he gonna get a faceful of pain, or pass out, or what? He feels a little icy in the stomach at the thought of it spiraling out of control. He really should have tried to get rid of this, huh? But it just seemed easier to deal with things as they came...

"You'd be able to — to see what happened right?"

A pause.

"It might look... kinda bad. I don't know. I was, um. Bitten."

Just a little, no big dealio.

That tells her a few things. One, whatever happened was traumatic enough that Sam's own sense of banal reality asserted itself. Too many conflicting viewpoints, you know? It's complicated. But that's bad-- she quickens her steps until she's almost running, because if that's the case the chimerical damage was probably enough to kill him.

And second-- well, he follows that up himself. Bitten. She's going through the short list of nastier chimera that she knows of. Mikleo's dragon is fading and shouldn't have been an issue. Sam's echoes are... not really the biting type. Sascha, at least, is long gone. Who else?

"I'm sure it's fine." She says it placidly, and he can probably hear the echo of her voice in the corridors beyond as she gets closer. "Did you swim too far out into shark-infested waters?"

She knows of the existence of Arlong, of course. But that echo was also dying, more faded than Mikleo's dragon. It also shouldn't be a problem.

But it is an echo that Sam must see all the time. That. Is a problem she should have seen coming. But maybe she's wrong.

He bites his lip, quiet for a telling amount of time.

There's a hesitation in his step, but he keeps moving in long strides. Almost there.

Quietly: "I might have."

And then Katie rounds the corner into the corridor to come face to face with Sam, and uh. Freezes. Puts a hand up almost as if he's holding a gun on her, like-- easy does it.

To her senses, he's covered in blood. The gaping wound that is sets of shark teeth slicing through bone like so much paper, muscle gaping as raggedly open as his shirt? It's enough to give a headache, overlaying one set of circumstances over another, but she can at least be grateful she's the only one that can see it.

"Close your eyes, Sam."

Because when she engages magic, there's a high chance it'll trigger him back to seeing this. At least it's not all the way through-- the echo must have shorted out mid-bite. But the damage is damage enough.

Sam closes his eyes as ordered; he's not about to disagree with her right now after what just happened. This isn't good, right? Far from good. He clenches his jaw and asks the obvious, because that's really all he can do right now and they both know it. He's really not sure what to do, what it means.

"Is it as bad as it looked?"

Because it, um, it looked really bad.

Maybe he was super wrong, when he decided to just ride it all out.

"Is what as bad as it looks?" Mildly, though her tone is too brittle to be called casual. "I can't see a thing."

She lays both hands across his shoulder, fingers sinking into bloodsoaked shirt tatters on either side of deep bite marks and taking a breath. She doesn't have the luxury of doing this slowly, using cantrips to make it easier on herself and slow the drain of magic. What Katie does is aggressively shove glamour into the wound, healing it over a matter of seconds. It drains her a lot faster, but on the other hand when Sam feels it again-- and he will, engaging glamour will flick his other senses back online, so to speak-- it's only for a second.

Probably not enough time to see the wound. Enough time to feel it, though, before it's abruptly gone. So she'll brace just in case of staggering moose.

Oh, yeah, suddenly feeling a giant shark bite really takes the wind outta you. A cry of pain gets caught in his throat and he feels lightheaded for a moment, his knees nearly buckling and his eyes stinging -- he tries his best not to flat-out crash into her, instead putting his hands on her shoulders like she's done to him, a mirror image.

"Katie--" He blinks hard, a bit panicked, plenty concerned. "What'd you do?"

He didn't say to do that, miss. He doesn't exactly want you getting yourself into trouble on his account, so do him a favor and be okay, okay?

Don't you give her that, Sam Winchester. If you seek Katie out, she's going to do a lot more than just look at a problem. She's plenty fine, just a little tired and not likely to employ more magic for a day or so. Though she might stagger just a bit under his weight, but that's rather more to do with the fact he's so much bigger and heavier than she is.

"Do? I don't recall doing anything." Her tone is still very mild, an understated kind of working up to some serious issues. "Perhaps a shark ate my memory, too. Are you still in pain?"

Look at his shoulder now and he'll see the rents and tears of his shirt and too much blood, but given it looked fine a few seconds ago to him it might feel like one heck of a case of dysphoria. Or double vision.

He blinks hard, looking hesitantly at the spot on his shoulder.

"I, um... Should I be?"

Let's just clear that up. Or unclear that up, considering Katie. He raises a hand to gingerly prod at where the shark bite had crippled him earlier.

"You want a straight answer to that?" Wryly. But his answer is answer enough. She tugs the torn sections of his shirt back together, patting them down, but she's not careless enough with her glamour to give in to the whim to fix it.

"If you like this shirt, you should come find me on a warmer day." Lightly, before she pulls back, confident he's not about to keel over.

Now.

"What happened?"

He bites his lip, flashing back through the whole situation; yeah, what happened, huh? He kinda screwed something up at some point, right? Rubbing the back of his neck, he says, "Good old Arlong pushed a glass off the table, and I, uh. I reacted more than usual."

He usually, y'know, ignores Arlong. And the rest of it. After he got compromised with his hell self, though, it's been a bit harder. It freaked him out a lot, to be honest. Especially with how Lucifer went, in Adstringendum.

"... They don't usually push glasses over."

Her eyebrows go up. They usually don't, no. This could mean one of two things, so. One last question.

"Were you the only one to see this?"

... He nods.

"Yeah. Just me. Which is... better than the alternative at least, right?"

"Not necessarily." In absence of being honest, be cryptic. "Did anyone else notice the glass go over?"

Sam is just gonna wince, because, uh —

"Uh... yeah. The person the echo belonged to."

At least that clarifies a glass actually went over. Echoes are kinda tricky in that-- it'd be less ominous, if still alarming, if Sam just thought it did.

But interaction with the real world is the tipping point, and Katie sighs. "Can she see the shark man?" She assumes not at this point, but best to make sure. She needs to know how urgent to make this.

Of that, he's at least confident.

He shakes his head, quite sure of himself.

"No. She knows something weird happened, but..."

Then it's a matter of time, still, but it's not immediate. Katie relaxes. A little, at least. If the nice shark man can't interact physically with his creator, she's safe-- but given he's a hair shy of becoming nervosa, that just means he'll target those he can interact with.

Guess who that might be, Sam.

Well look, it's not just you. He'll probably try to pick on Katie, too. Which would be a very unwise choice. So she'll just have to make sure Arlong runs into her first.

"Can you avoid your friend for a while?"

He frowns deeply at the thought.

"Not if I want to avoid her hunting me down and backhanding me."

She wouldn't take avoidance well, he's pretty sure. But maybe she'd understand if he explained the problem at hand? Or maybe she'd be mad at him that he hasn't fixed it yet. Or mad not at him, but at the whole stupid situation. Either way, Nami's ire should be avoided. So this must be done delicately.

"Do your friends always backhand you if you leave for one night?" Dryly. "Maybe that's something I should keep in mind. There are places you can go for such abuse, you know."

She's kidding. Mostly. But Katie shakes her head. "Between a backhand and another shark bite, I feel you should probably make a wise choice."

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CLOSED // wake me up, before you echo

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Bet your ass she would