second trial. | voice (unlocked)

[greenies]

[ thomas has not been a common presence on the network since his arrival to the drabwurld; gaining the ability to talk telepathically with the people who've been close to him have made it fairly easy for him to communicate without it. but this time, thomas addresses the network at large, although only with a (perhaps semi-familiar) voice.

he sounds uneasy. tired. ]

Do any of you have nightmares? How do you deal with them?

[ it's a stab at anonymity, mostly because he doesn't want to show his face, but the storms currently raging over head have not made his life any easier. thomas sleeps fitfully, twenty minutes at a time, wakes up screaming. no one's going to see his face as an effect of that. eventually, he tacks on a soft--]

Thanks. [ --and the line goes dead. ]

Comments

[greenies]

Yeah. The limits I had at home don't exactly apply here. [ thomas smiles, but it's bitter, and you can hear it in his voice. ] Now that death's not breathing down my neck, I have a lot more time to think about things.

[ to say the least. thomas feels entirely safer in the drabwurld but a part of him keeps thinking that he's going to wake up with rat man looming over him, or suddenly be dumped into a fourth trial. WICKED's been destroyed and thomas still thinks they're coming to get him, that they'll tear out his brain and experiment on it as their final candidate. he escaped with their lives, but so few of his friends did, and that's what will stay with him forever. ]

[steelminded]

Except now it's the freedom itself that makes you feel guilty about it, right?

[ Because he had been there once, surviving a huge fire that only left a handful of orphans as the survivor only to find out your family perished alongside your sense of self. Taking up an impossible dream in order to run away from the phantoms of the people that he failed to save even if they're strangers.

For him, the nightmares of the conflict he was a part in has started to fade, but that ever-important nightmare won't.

As if a grim reminder on what fate should befall him if he ever voices his satisfaction of his situation. ]

[greenies]

Exactly. [ it's sort of refreshing and sort of not. it's...weird, that so many of the shardholders had been through similar things. all of them, ripped from lives that were cruel to them, and brought here, where a war was kind in comparison.

there's a faint bit of humor to his tone, a little bit of a smile, even if it can't be seen. ] We're all so messed up, there should be a support group for it.

[ the "i'd never go so it'd be moot" is underlying in the statement, but he doesn't bother saying it out loud--that's part of the humor. ]