bakerstreet | How can we rewrite the stars?

Entry tags:

[meme] shipping

How can we rewrite the stars?

( what you can never have )

When two people come together in a relationship, it's a beautiful thing. What can be wrong with love, right? Right? Except when the union is completely and totally wrong, for whatever reason. Then things can get a little messy.

How To Play

1. Comment with your character, listing their name, canon, etc, along with any preferences.
2. Comment around to others, using the RNG to determine the scenario. It doesn't have to be a lovey-dovey relationship, obviously. There can be hate, sorrow, lust, whatever.
3. Thread! Have fun! Do things!

Scenarios

1. Warring Factions: You belong to rival organizations, armies, clubs, etc. Whatever it is, you're not on the same team.

2. Soldiers on the Battlefield: Or maybe you are on the same side, but this is the wrong time and the wrong place. Plus, attachments cause distractions.

3. Bodyguard and the Guarded: Just like the movie with Kevin Costner! One of you has been hired to protect the other for some reason, and feelings are starting to grow. Are you a professional and cut things off, or do you give in?

4. Prince/ss and Knight: Similar to the above, but with a whole 'nother level of wrong...one of you is royal. Courtly love is okay; still, don't forget your place.

5. Enemies: This vendetta is personal, and you totally hate this person! Don't you? Perhaps you're maybe just rivals, or something as serious as superhero and villain.

6. Family: The ultimate taboo. This person is related to you, so there's no way you should indulge this desire, even if it's the most pure love there ever was.

7. Age Difference: The years between you should keep you both at bay, but it's easier said than done.

8. Teacher/Student: Teachers and students have a unique bond, and to corrupt it is a dangerous thing. Will you dare to act on emotions that could put you both in a destructive place?

9. Already Spoken For: One or both of you are already involved with someone else, but the heart wants what the heart wants. Just know that you can't have your cake and eat it, too.

10. Not Compatible: Your personalities or jobs make it so it's hard for you to be together.

11. Not Compatible...in Another Way: You're both different species, which means you're either afraid to take your relationship to a physical level or you can't because of differences in biologies.

12. Not Ready for Love: You took a vow (or celibacy, of chastity, of dedication), you're married to your work, or you just don't want to be involved with anyone. Too bad!

13. Rich and Poor: One of you has the money while the other is from more modest means. Can the 1% and the 99% ever be bedfellows, literally?

14. Hurt Before: Your heart has been broken, and maybe there's been no time to heal. But here you are.

15. WILDCARD

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

((Let me know if you want me to revise this to go the Freddy vs. Jason route with Springwood instead of the Nightmare on Elm Street 6 one!))

No matter how far or how fast Jacob ran, he'd never make it to freedom. For him, it didn't exist - not until he broke the shackles of his past for good. There had been a time when he'd dared to hope otherwise, but that was months in the past now, and in the meantime, the road had become a nightmare all its own. The bad shit he'd gotten mixed up in wasn't true Bad Shit, not yet, but it still had the potential to kill him - and he'd decided that, what the hell, he'd be better off dying for something.

The new designer psychedelic he was supposed to be delivering to a buyer in New York was based off a drug that had been on the verge of making it into clinical trials before the company producing it had gone bankrupt, and it already even had a catchy name: Somnambulene. Jacob told himself he didn't believe in fate anymore, but that package making its way into his hands had definitely rattled him.

And somewhere along the seemingly endless stretch of narcotic blackness that was I-70, he'd come to a decision.

He'd made a point of never even driving past the exit that would eventually lead to Springwood, yet still it was somehow as familiar to him as it had been when Alice had taken them away from that town for good, sixteen years ago, when Jacob was only five. All the turns were familiar, the road instinctive in a way he didn't want to consider the implications of; it was only what he found at the end that wasn't.

Springwood didn't exist anymore.

The town was completely abandoned, and evidently had been for years; as he glanced into the broken windows of the dilapidated houses lining the streets, not wanting to look too hard for signs of life, he found himself uncomfortably imagining the empty eyesockets of the Springwood Slasher's victims. Freddy had drained the life from this town, and Jacob wondered if this time the disease had finally died with the host. He would find out soon.

He broke away from his path through the debris-strewn neighborhood streets before he'd even reached Elm Street, heading for the power plant instead. He supposed a security company had to have been hired to watch the place when the town still existed, but when he arrived, there was no sign that anyone had so much has come near it in years; the high chain link fence that had surrounded it once had fallen down into the road. Rather than drive over it - the idea of not wanting to risk a puncture when there was probably no way Jacob was ever coming back out actually made him laugh, for the first time in weeks - he simply pulled his car off to the side of the road, tucked the pills into his jacket pocket, grabbed a crowbar from the trunk, and started to walk.

With the shape the rest of the town was in, and knowing how much longer the power plant had been abandoned, he was worried at first that there was no way he'd be able to get down to the boiler room, but as soon as he'd busted through the heavily rusted lock on a side door, it became apparent that the interior of the building was eerily well-preserved. As he made his way into the bowels of the plant, the stairs and railings were unsettlingly rusted, but proved to be solid to his touch. Only now did the urge to run begin to rise up again, but it was as though a nightmare had already claimed him, one of the ones where he was powerless to resist the movements of his own body as it independently made its way toward something truly horrific.

He knew he'd found what he was looking for as soon as his eyes settled on the hulk of the old furnace. This was where Krueger had disposed of the bodies of his victims, when he was still alive, and Jacob settled himself down in front of it; once again, his limbs seemed to move entirely of their own volition as he took the bottle out of his pocket, and forced two pills over the back of his tongue before he could think the better of it.

Now I lay me down, to sleep, the master of dreams my soul I keep. In the reflection of my mind's eye, evil will see itself, and it shall thrive.

The auditory hallucinations came first, with the distant hiss of steam and hum of turbines rising out of what had been numbing silence. "Freddy, if you're here, answer me." Jacob's voice was little more than a whisper, and it sounded strange in his own ears, but at least it wasn't trembling.

The screech of metal over metal was followed quickly by the thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump of something sharp being thrust into wood and and pulled out quickly. Freddy drummed his gloved fingers on the workshop table top and stared at the boiler room wall. He was bored, bored, bored. Didn't anyone sleep any more? It had gotten better since he figured out how to widen his dreamwalking spectrum past just Springwood but it took a lot of effort to get there and he couldn't do it all the time. It was much easier when there was someone actually in his old town. All and all Freddy Krueger was growing weary of his afterlife prison, fun as it could be some times, it could be twice as boring at others.

He was just starting to contemplate the merits of figuring out how to keep someone around for an extended period of time, you know, just for the entertainment value, when he heard a tentative voice calling out his name. Actually calling out for him. A smile spread across his disfigured face, pulling the reddened, blotchy skin at tight, odd angles and he leap to his feet. The chair he'd been sitting in crashed to the floor with an overly loud clatter and he wondered, as he leaped into the air, his heels touching as he did, if the sound had made his visitor jump in fright.

Reigning in his excitement he slithered into the shadows and all but vanished into the places between the walls. The eerie screech rang through the place as he walked along, toward his next victim, dragging his clawed hand along the pipes behind him.

He let out a long, low, rolling bark of maniacal laughter which hung in the air much longer than it should have before dying away. Then he was there, appearing out of nothing his broken, yellowed and mangled teeth visible in his evil grin. He raised his gloved hand to his chin, one blade tapping against his cheek in a show of contemplation.

"Well, well, what have we here. Little sheep excited for the slaughter?"

Jacob didn't have to ask twice. Before the words had even died away, he could feel the darkness pouring up from the depths of the Boiler Room, the deepest pit of Springwood's nightmares, and it was just as disturbing as it was familiar. He flinched at the crack of Freddy's chair hitting the floor, but the screaming of metal on metal, he was prepared for; it was a sound he still heard in his nightmares now and again, even though Krueger hadn't been able to touch him for more than a decade and a half. It sounded like coming home.

And then, sooner than he'd dared to hope, the dreamstalker was before him - and Jacob realized how terribly unprepared for this moment he had been. All the possibilities he'd been considering for how this moment would go, all the ways he'd thought he was going to fight, or flee, or try to wrest control of the nightmare from Freddy to show him just what his once almost-protege had become, all of it scattered before the reality of Freddy Krueger, swept into the far corners of Jacob's mind on a tide of fear and hate and excruciating longing.

Freddy was shorter than Jacob remembered, and he could feel how much his powers had diminished - yet, in some ways, nothing had changed. He still held Jacob's darkest and deepest desires in the palm of his hand, and the lure of all that power and control and evil that needed only fuel to rise back up into an all-consuming fire was something Jacob didn't know if he'd ever be strong enough to resist. Now would have been the moment to strike, to try to put an end to it all, before whatever moral fiber Jacob had was truly tested, but he could barely even bring himself to breathe, let alone go on the offensive.

After a second, he gathered enough of his composure to at least do something, and he rose to his feet as though pulled by strings. "Don't you recognize me, Freddy?" Satisfyingly, it turned out he'd mastered the butterflies in his stomach well enough for his voice to come out even, and icy, and deep, and significantly louder than before. "We used to be such good friends, after all." He cocked his head to one side, and gave Freddy a small, brittle smirk, wondering if he'd come to the realization on his own, or if Jacob really would have to see if he could start snaking out tendrils of influence over the nightmare in order for him to get it.

Freddy cocked his head to one side, a mirror of the teen's gesture, and studied him for a moment. There was something very familiar, almost intimately so, about him. It took only a moment more for him to get there. Another smile began to creep slowly across his lips. This was a Springwood child. Better still, this was his Springwood child.

They could escape. They could run and they could hide, but they always, always returned to him. Eventually, they all came back to seek their fate at the hand of their god, Freddy. And god was always happy to take them back. To chew their souls and spit out their broken, bloodied bodies. This one though, this one was different. This one he had cared about, in so much as he could care about anyone. This one he had wanted to keep. The sting of that betrayal still sizzled beneath the surface of his skin and festered.

"Jacob Johnson," Freddy stalked forward like a demented cat, claws waggling before him, "did you come back for a little family reunion?"

Freddy's eyes moved around the space, as if expecting to find someone else there with them, "how's mommy? Come tell daddy all about it."

He stopped a few feet from the boy and spread his arms wide, much wider than was natural, as if in invitation for a hug.

"I haven't spoken to mother in some time, but last time I did, she was doing well. You're never going to find her, and she's never going to know what happened to me." Ordinarily, he wouldn't have even said that much to Krueger, but how carelessly he had dropped the daddy card had put Jacob in a little more of a giving mood - after all, it meant that whatever had really happened to Dan, he hadn't come back here, and Freddy didn't have him again. Which, in turn, meant he had no leverage over Jacob this time.

Nothing except what mattered most, anyway.

For the moment, he didn't move toward Freddy, nor did he drop the crowbar that was still in his hand. "And if you want me to call you daddy, you'll have to make me." He'd thought he'd known why he was here, but his resolve had fled, now that he was face to face with Krueger. Jacob had tried to deny it to himself, but there was always a danger he would end up not trying to destroy Freddy, but joining him; part of him craved the power the two of them had together, desired it more than anything. He'd been keeping that part at bay by telling himself constantly that Krueger wasn't capable of giving Jacob the kind of love he wanted, or of feeling anything for him except a desire to use him. Yet... he couldn't permanently silence it, the way that part of him wanted the two of them to be together.

Maybe he'd be lucky if he died here after all. Maybe that would be the only thing keeping him from unleashing Freddy's evil on the world.

Edited (I'm down for continuing this anytime if you have any interest) 2018-11-17 00:53 (UTC)