2019-11-02 - Sweet Dreams

It all starts with a day date exploring the 'zoo' by the park. The monkeys that somebody was supposed to free were still there, but there was a new parrot in one of the aviary cages. It's been taught to say 'what's up fuckers?' whenever somebody walks by, so of course Harvey made them walk by it at least five times. And it was a pleasant date that didn't seem like it would get any weirder than normal weird .. until they went down to the pond for a small picnic in the park. Just as Harvey was breaking out the pulled pork sandwiches that he got from some guy selling food in a cooler? The sky darkens overhead.

"I said WHAT'S UP FUCKERS?!?!" booms like thunder across the land, before a gigantic version of the parrot they saw at in the 'zoo' comes to land, ruffling its feathers. It extends a wing and stares at them with soulless, beady black bird eyes until they climb aboard. Because of course the giant parrot was wearing a giant parrot saddle.

Not all Dreams have to be terrifying. This one was whimsical once they got over the whole 'flying across Gray Harbor on the back of a giant gray parrot' thing. Harvey even bursts into song, his scratchy rendition of 'A Whole New World', but he's obviously not seen Aladdin in a long time since he sang all of Jasmine's parts. It was fun, light and carefree .. until the parrot decides to do a loop-de-loop in the air and they freefall fifty feet into the pond below, full of purple jello. The smell was never going to come out of their clothes.

That's okay. Hailey looks good in purple! Plus, it's grapy, so she's calling that one a success. "Or. At least. Not a failure." Also, she thinks the singing is cute because she's goddamn easy; it's just the universe that makes things difficult.

A few days later, they actually make it through an ENTIRE DINNER at a Peruvian place that just opened up in New London. There's a lot of 'shhhh' going on the front porch when Hailey's trying to get the door to Abby's house open and parts of Harvey's clothes open at the same time, but neither of those things work out.

Because the porch detaches from the front of the house, and suddenly they're adrift. On a black sea, with nothing but endless, rolling waves all around them, and pinpricks of starlight overhead. It'd be romantic were it not for the pirates that roll up after a few hours of them aimless drifting on the porch-raft.

That's how they get scooped up and made to walk the plank. At least they're more like cartoon-pirates than real-pirates, though, so no one gets violated beyond repair. Just forced off the end of the plank, leaving them to land in a pained heap on the porch, which has politely returned to the front of Abby's house.

Oh, and that same fucking parrot was there, just smaller now, going "WHAT'S UP FUCKERS" while it flapped around on the pirate captain's shoulders. Fuck parrots.

A few days after that, while the bruises were still fresh from landing face-first back on Abby's porch, they meet downtown at the patisserie because those goddamn Dreams won't ruin dessert for Harvey. There's a spot for them to sit and watch the baking happen in the kitchen, and the chef on shift offers them free samples of the new creations they are working on - Harvey's favorite is, of course, the passion fruit miniature pie because it's like a 'bite sized tropical vacation.' Just before closing, the chef offers them a tour in the kitchens to see the fancy breads that are baking, and that's how Harvey and Hailey get baked into a loaf of bread.

Except the chef that bakes them is Spanish, so he keeps calling it 'un pan' and thus it still counts as a P word.

Of course, that bread is sold to an old woman who goes to feed them to the giant parrots at the pond, and when they get LITERALLY pooped back out? The parrot yells "WHAT'S UP FUCKERS!" at them. Harvey, covered in bird shit and bits of 'un pan' groans. "Is this going to be a running theme?"

Hailey's a smart cookie. She's going to put this shit together. So next time? She falls back on her favorite 'date' - "Let's go for a walk. In the parrrrrrforest! Let's go for a walk in the forest."

Nothing anthropomorphs on them. But there's a massive pine tree that keeps dogging them as they go. Like, they start down a path, get maybe ten yards, and BAM! Pine tree. If they try to walk around it, they just find an identical one right on the other side. So they turn around, and there's another identical one. Left - pine tree. Right - pine tree. Eventually, for want of being able to do anything but keep smacking into pine trees everywhere they go, the decision is made to just sit here and wait for it to pass.

Some hikers find them in the morning, cold and damp and shivering beneath the boughs of a perfectly normal aspen tree whose leaves have all fallen off. One of the hikers has on a patch on the back of his pack with a parrot on it and WHAT'S UP FUCKERS stitched beneath it. Hailey was totally going to RUIN THAT GUY'S BACKPACK, but - instead - the parrot patch winks at her, so she winds up hitting it with a stick she picked up somewhere.

Thankfully, the hiker is pretty cool about the whole thing, and no charges get filed.

Harvey's not giving up hope yet. One day, someday, they were going to have a normal date that ends in normal sex and wake up in a normal bed. But that day was not today! This time, it's breakfast at Espresso Yourself before Hailey heads off to work - he stays away from all 'p' foods, just a hot coffee and a breakfast sandwich (never mind that it has red peppers in it). He finds them a puzzle of peaceful pandas in front of pagodas, and everything is fine.

Or, well, everything is fine until someone screams from the back room: "What the fuck is that?!" and a giant purple monster bursts out of the back wall Kool-Aid man style with one of the baristas held in his fist. He eats her whole - because he is a Purple People Eater - and tries to gobble himself through the crowd of bystanders who are all trying to get the hell out of dodge. It was by sheer luck that Harvey picked a seat by the front door, so he grabs Hailey by the hand and tugs her out of this crazy place. But Purple People Eaters are streaming out of every store, eating people. This time, the human sized African Gray Parrot that wears a trench coat with a shotgun slung over his shoulder is a welcome sight. He drags them down an alley, equips them with their very own pistols, and gives them some very sound advice:

"You make sure to look 'em in the eye just before you shoot 'em and say one thing. 'What's up, fuckers?!'"

Hailey doesn't drink coffee. Like, maybe that hasn't been expressly stated, but she doesn't. Still, she shows up for some kind of beverage and food, because you have to keep trying, right? Even if it just means you waste a bunch of bullets. She wouldn't count 'accidentally shooting Harvey in the back' among her best moments, but - well. Hold on.

She can probably save him. <.<

Oh good. She's got this. He's made better enough to keep fighting the good fight, and she can finish fixing him up the old-fashioned way later.

Mind you, that means they go from shot-gunning purple people eaters to drowning in peroxide before the night's out. Some nice pill people eventually throw them some life preservers, but it's hard to regroup after that.

They sell tea at Espresso Yourself so ohmygod she didn't have to shoot him in the back! She needs to calm down!

It takes some time to recover from being shot and drowning in peroxide (and boy did that shit sting), but eventually Harvey comes around with an idea. The jury's still out on whether or not he's a smart cookie, but he thinks he's got a chance here. "Look, let's just get out of town for awhile. The further we get from this place, you know? We'll go up to Seattle, for the weekend." It was a nice thought.

But getting out of Gray Harbor means they have to get out of Gray Harbor first. There's only one road out of town; one long, lonely stretch of highway lit at night only by the grace of the moon, when it is able to break through the overhead canopy of trees. There's a quiet song playing on the radio, and Harvey's got one hand on the wheel and one hand on Hailey, focusing on a weekend where it's just the two of them and maybe they could actually just have a moment.

He was too busy crooning the stupid Ed Sheeran song on the radio to her to see the porcupine that darts through the road. BUMP goes the front tires over the prickly animal, BOOM! goes the back tires when they are shredded by the needles. Jesus wasn't here to take the wheel, and Harvey's reaction wasn't on point - it shouldn't be any surprise when the car decides off-roading is the thing to do, and it slams into a pine tree that materializes rapidly in front of them.

The airbags go off, but not before Hailey slams her head on the dash. It's going to take her some time to recover, but by the time she does? She's in the car alone, a smear of blood across the steering wheel the only thing left of Harvey. The road's out of sight - there's nothing around her but forest.

Hailey's been on this ride before. The one where the car crashes. For the split-second before she knocks her head and everything goes black, it occurs to her to want to cry very loudly - she had to promise her first-born child to get a weekend off work, she's not wearing panties because they start with the letter P, and she's going to have a nice weekend if it kills her! So, of course, it just about kills her. If you think about it, she brings this shit on herself.

Coming to in a Harvey-free wrecked car is a painful process, but she gets there. She shoves open the door on her side, falls out of it, breathing through shaking tears while she tests the size of the goose-egg she's sporting. "Harvey?" This is going to hurt her head a lot but, "Harvey!"

If he doesn't appear, like, immediately? She's going to go tramping through the forest after him. Pine trees be damned, she'll burn the bitches down.

Harvey doesn't appear, like, immediately or otherwise. There's no sign of him in the near vicinity, not a helpful trail of blood or a parrot that goes 'what's up fucker?' and leads her out of the woods and to her beau. The pine trees seem to loom impossibly tall above her, illuminated by the moon that can't be seen and casting elongated shadows to chase at her feet. But in the far distance, she hears a voice, faded and far away.

"Hailey?! HAILEY! Shit, SHIT! Not this fucking road again!"

It was almost certainly Harvey, or something that sounds exactly like him. It's definitely coming from a singular direction, so she's got that going for her. Still, impeding her way forward is the fact that the trees start to get closer and closer together.

Hailey has hiking on her sheet. She'll be fine. Her phone has flashlight on it, and no harm has ever come from following voices through the forest, right?

Right.

"Just stay where you are!" she sends back, cupping her hands around her mouth. A warning look shoots at these looming trees, like she's including them in this command, but the look doesn't last beyond the wince that shouting sends racing down her spine. Her head hurts pretty bad. "Just keep making noise, bang a stick on a tree or something." One more challenging look for trees - did you hear that?! she will have you all beaten! - and she squeezes between a couple of these stupid tree-trunks, following the voice.

And NOT thinking about car crashes.

Hailey sends those shouts out into the forest, but her voice hits a pine tree and bounces right back, smacking her right in the bump on her head. It's blaring in her ears, her own voice, echoing around her mind in a mocking sort of manner. It's doubtful it ever reaches Harvey, wherever he might be. Actually, it's confirmed that it never reaches Harvey, when his voice reaches her again:

"Hailey?! Where are you?! God DAMMIT, let me off this god damn fucking road!" His voice bounces off the trees too, but she can hear it loud and clear.

And the pines don't seem to care about the threatening looks that Hailey is giving them. They start to crowd around her, clustering together. It starts to narrow, blocking off exits - there's a wall of pine to the left, to the right, crowding her in and forcing her forward, until there's no further forward that she can go. The trees in front of her are flat together, branches shaped and twisted to form something of a door, with a pinecone handle that has a tiny spot for a key. At the very top of the pine door is a peephole, one that Hailey can reach if she stands on her tippy-toes. But really it would just be helpful if she brought a key with her, surely she has a key?

Hailey HAD a key. She can very clearly remember the key. She knows exactly what the key looks like. Actually, she can't remember it all that clearly and isn't sure anymore if it was polished brass or tarnished, but she's not ready to admit that out loud. Regardless, the point is: She HAD a key, so she starts patting her pockets to see if maybe that key has come along for the ride.

In the meantime, she climbs up on some of those tangled door-branches, wedging her toes into the gaps so she can peer through the peep hole. "Harvey?" at a more cautious volume, so she doesn't break her own head open.

In the back of her very hurting mind, it does occur to her that a peephole in a pine-tree is two more Ps than she wants to deal with right now. 🙁

It's unfortunate that she doesn't have the key anymore. Hailey doesn't know why, but she's certain down to the every fibre of her being that a brass-or-maybe tarnished key that looks exactly like the key she had would fit into this hole, turn the lock, and reunite her with Harvey on the other side. If only she hadn't given it away, if only she'd held out just a little longer - this was the door, Hailey, the one she's been searching for!

But it does not open. The point is: she HAD a key, and she doesn't have it now, so she has to press her face against the pine-tree peep-hole and see out to the road. It's a highway that tickles her memory, too, she knows this highway, except it looks off. Mostly because either end of the road is capped by a blanket of darkness, just endless black. Harvey is out on the road, pacing down the double yellow lines, his forehead weeping blood. "God dammit, god dammit! I don't want to BE here! HAILEY!!!" his voice was raw from screaming, but he stops in his walking and drops into a runner's stance, like he's going to push off and run full speed down the road and pitch himself into the blackness. And that's exactly what he does - he runs full speed down the road towards the darkness and SLAMS into an invisible barrier, falling backwards onto the road with a groan and a swallowed sob.

Hailey can see it then, the sign at the very edge of the darkness: DEAD END.

Palm banging on the door, Hailey clings to those twined branches with her other hand and the ends of her toes for long enough to watch Harvey smash into the invisible barrier. Between how hard it is to just stay here like this and the wince that his landing draws out of her, it's time to let go of the door and slide back down to her feet. There's no further attempt to yell at him, that just hurt her head. Instead, leaning with her back against the door, she takes a moment to order her thoughts, breathing slowly through the confusion and hurt, letting cold hard logic prevail here.

First things first: She tries the doorknob. Failing that...

Normally, Hailey has nothing against the woods and stuff. She likes going for walks among the trees. But fuck this tree in particular, this one with a door in it. She presses both palms flat to the middle of the thing, pushes on it, and wills it to become brittle and cracked - old, dead, rotting wood, the kind that would be full of beetle-holes, on the verge of crumbling to splintery powder.

On the road, Harvey picks himself up off the asphalt. His pants are torn, his knee is bleeding, there's a few scrapes on his hands, but he stalks to the end of the road where it disappears into the darkness, with every intention of aggressively kicking the invisible barrier. Except, the barrier isn't there when he tries to kick it, so his leg goes up and through the darkness, catching him off balance. He teeters forward, flails and pitches himself back into the asphalt again, knocking his noggin on the road and cracking the back of his skull open. It's not a good look for good ol' Harv.

Hailey sees all of this, all of this happening; the doorknob does not budge, but she presses her palms flat into the middle of the door and it doesn't just become brittle and cracked; it explodes in a burst of tiny splinters. At least that damnable door is open in time for Hailey to see what comes next.

Harvey, knocked unconscious from his moment of rage, laying there bleeding on the road. From the opposite end of the road - where another DEAD END sign stands - the foggy glow of headlights appear in the darkness. Hailey can simultaneously see this car coming - some old boat-like Chevy that drifts across the yellow lines, gaining speed as it heads down the road towards Harvey's head - while also seeing into the car, the images sort of coming through like a split screen except also melting together in a confusing fashion.

In the car, an older man's at the wheel. He looks like Harvey aged about thirty years, graying hair and a scratchy beard. There's papers everywhere on the seat, and he's got one hand on the wheel but he's not focusing on the road, he's scrambling through those papers trying to find something. "Dead ends, dead ends! Everywhere are fucking dead ends!" he grabs a handful of papers and tosses them in the backseat; but a few in particular stand out. Scratching, rambling writings about Glimmer and its abilities, the name 'Doctor Marshal' written in bold and underlined several times. The car drifts, and the old man doesn't course correct, he doesn't even seem aware that his car's about to hit this lump in the road dead on. But maybe that has less to do with the man's obsession on the papers in the seat beside him, and more to do with the passenger in the back seat; a mess of writhing shadows that reach out and crawl down the man's arm, gently urging the wheel at an angle.

That's a lot to process in one glance. Especially since Hailey pushing through what used to be a door and is now just a puff of sawdust at the same second, spitting out a couple of scraps that she just inhaled. The number of things her brain is like 'file this away and deal with it later' is a lot. The number of things her brain accepts as immediate issues is one: the car.

She both runs - just full-on sprints along the edge of this road toward where Harvey is sprawled out - and reaches out to try to ruin that tire at the same time. The former works to some extent: she is running toward Harvey, trying to get there before the car does and, she dunno, pull him off onto the shoulder or at least get him to, "Move, Harvey!" The latter doesn't: the tire remains unaffected, with her sad little Spirit Knife failing to cut through the treads.

At the very least, Hailey gets to Harvey before the car makes ground beef of his head across the asphalt. It's in this moment that Harvey comes to, bleary eyed and groggy with his blood soaking into the road. "Hailey?" he groans, reaching up with a trembling hand to flail through the air and try to touch her. She's so beautifully illuminated after all, by the hazy glow of .. are those headlights?

As Harvey reaches for her, the driver in the car finally recognizes something in the road. "SHIT!" he leans on the horn, and in that weird split vision that Hailey's got going on, she can see the driver and the shadow intertwined as one - the driver tries to compensate for the sudden appearance of something in the road, the shadow helps lean a little bit more into the wheel, and there is the ear-splitting screech of tires as the car cuts hard to the left just seconds before it slams into the both of them. It bumps off the road, course-corrects to bring itself back, and careens into the darkness, where the glow of a lightpost materializes.

At the same time, Harvey puts his hand on Hailey. From his perspective though, it's like she vanishes before his eyes; his hand cuts through nothing, emptiness. From her perspective, it's like she's suddenly pulled backwards - no, sucked backwards - dragged by her shirt and skin into the same darkness that the car went through. In the next instant, she's the back passenger of a car that she should remember, with a driver that she should remember; he's crying, apologizing to her, and all the car doors are locked. Up ahead is not darkness, just the edge of a cliff.

Hailey? "Yeah. We need to - " The end of that sentence probably wasn't 'turn and watch this accident happen,' but that's what Hailey does. Sudden, screeching noise makes her recoil, fall back onto her palms on the asphalt, mutely horrified by the show, the only sound from her after those words is a choked gasp.

Until things go from bad-to-worse. At least from her perspective. It's fair to say that she's forgotten to be worried about Harvey right now. The choked gasp becomes a sob, and the frantic cries that Harvey needs to move become a confused little girl's, "Daddy, don't, please don't do this." It's always better to run into the side of a mountain that to drive off a cliff, so grown-up Hailey fights for the wheel the way little Hailey didn't even know she should have, struggling frantically to turn the thing hard her way, into the cliff.

"We'll get you help, I promise. Please." She knows how this ride ends, though, and when the car hits the guard rail, she squeezes her eyes closed and waits for that feeling of faaaaaaaaalling.

It is a struggle that Hailey will not win, no matter how hard she tries to turn the wheel. The car smashes through the guard rail and sails over the edge of the cliff, and it was always a damn miracle that Hailey survived where her father didn't. The last thing she'll remember is the way his corpse looked, bent and broken and smashed, bits of steel impaled in places that would've been fatal had the impact itself not killed him, and those are the kinds of memories that stay even if the good ones are filtering out, fading away. In fact, everything around her starts to fade, melting to white, until all that remains is her and the broken body of her father, the sight of him burning into her retinas.

It's the kind of image that will stay, haunting, even when she finds herself back in Harvey's car. It is not smashed into a pine tree; it is just on the side of the road, emergency blinkers flashing on-off-on-off at a steady rhythm. Harvey's not in the car, but that's because he's on his hands and knees directly outside of it, puking up his guts. And maybe a little bit of blood.

For a minute, they're just going to have to deal with their traumas separately. He can stay out there, getting sick; she'll stay in here, drying her eyes. Slumped down below the horizon of the dashboard, Hailey stares at the little button that opens the glove box for some indeterminate amount of time - a minute, an hour, she's not counting - and sucks in progressively less shaky breaths. It's a process, not a quick-fix.

Eventually, she pushes open the car door, puts her feet on solid ground, and walks around the front of the car, interrupting the headlights. There's a cold hand to the back of Harvey's neck, icy fingers settled carefully where she leans over him, unfazed by the vomit; it ain't like he hasn't thrown up on at least two other occasions when she was there, so she's just used to it by now.

Her voice cracks when she asks, "Are you okay?"

Cuz apparently she can't tell.

When Hailey exits the vehicle, she sees one thing: The car is stopped about two feet away from a light post, moths gathering around the flickering light. It's not like it's out of place, it's just there, making a circle of light along the road. Harvey doesn't seem to acknowledge her until the ice cold of her hands creeps up his back, along his neck, and then he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. His eyes are blood shot, and he's got some pretty nasty cuts, including one on the back of his head that definitely needs stitches. But when he sees her, it's like nothing else matters; and he turns to her suddenly, seizing her to him, squeezing her so hard that it's only by way of the lack of blood that he doesn't end up cracking her back or something.

"Fuck, you're back," he exhales a breath like he's been holding it forever, though that's impossible because he must've been breathing while he was throwing up his guts. But she's back, she's here, and he clings to her, bowing his head to her shoulder. "I fucking hate this town," he admits.

Hailey's hand comes away from the back of his neck with blood on her fingers, something she can see in the light from that handy light-post that jumped out in front of their car and tried to kill them a minute ago. This, she realizes while having the air hugged out of her; there should be some reaction to that from Hailey, but she just lets it happen without resistance, neither encouraging nor stopping it. "You're bleeding," she informs him, unable to get a good view of this head-gash from this position.

"Sit down," in the passenger seat. "I'll drive you home." Unless he objects to this somehow, he's going to get put into that seat with a t-shirt from his overnight bag wadded to the back of his head. She doesn't even make an effort to pretend there aren't gears turning in her mind - WHY WAS YOUR DAD LOOKING FOR DOCTOR MARSHALL, HARVEY? LET'S TALK ABOUT THAT. - but she'd rather have that conversation somewhere else. Preferably while she has a needle with which she can stab him in the eyes when it comes to that.