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[sealyourfate.livejournal.com]

Who: Alec & Euphie
What: Dream crashing
When: Sometime today
Where: Alec's room/dream
Rating: PG


This was a depressing sort of dream, Euphie tilted her head at what was surrounding her. This... this seemed wrong. Those kids. Those kids shouldn't have such grim faces, or look so... rough.

She shuddered. The ground was not ideal for her long skirt and shoes but she kept moving along, surveying the surroundings. She just felt... sad for them.

It had come as a shock to Alec to see a pink haired figure enter the space where his room had once been, but now was nothing more than a swirling mass of old memories brought to obscurity in dream form. Truth be told he'd been avoiding his own room since the moment he'd woken up to find himself in a waking version of his own nightmares. Something that was probably a mistake on his part, considering leaving it laid him out bare for any passerby to get a chance to peek into his dreams.

"Euphie!" Alec's tone rang out with a sort of irritation he hadn't heard from himself in a long time. It was rare for something to bother him much, even more so for him to actually get angry. Though, the anger wasn't really directed at her, it wasn't like every other person wasn't popping in and out of their friends dreams. The irritation went towards the castle for even making them viewable in the first place.

Euphie had been in the process of trying to talk to one of the kids when Alec's familiar voice rang out. He sounded... angry. The princess turned her head in the direction of his voice, "...Ah? Alec?" she was giving him a confused look. Why had she come up here again- looking for him, or something like that but instead she'd wondered into this... depressing sort of place and...

Was this his dream?

"What are you doing here?" he said, forcing his tone to sound as casual as possible, but it came out strained and fake even to his own ears. "This isn't much of a dream. Why'd you want to hang out in a place like this?" The smile he offered her had an even more painfully fake quality than his tone. Seemed like living off on his own had worn down his edge. It shouldn't be that hard for him to bullshit anybody... even her. He let his eyes flit to the side for a moment, keeping his face calm and composed, as though it looked like he had mild interest in someone else's dream.

Euphie wasn't stupid, while she would never beat Lelouch at chess she could see people- she saw Alec's fakeness. It unsettled her and she couldn't bring herself to smile back, even if she wanted to. "I was looking for you." She stated looking up at him, Euphie had wanted to see the dreams of other people she knew or to invite them into her own. No, this wasn't much of a dream... but that was the point, wasn't it? There had always been something different about Alec- other than what he'd told her.

"But this is your dream." She turned from him to look around again. It didn't fit the Alec she knew. At all.

The smile vanished off his face in an instant. No, she wasn't a dumb girl, he knew that. Still... he'd been hoping she'd think this sort of dream would belong to someone else with a slightly more troubled sounding past. It wasn't as though Paradisa was lacking in those types. "My dream?" he asked, chuckling harshly. "You think so? Nah, this isn't really my thing." He shrugged lightly. "Whatever the case, you said you came looking for me? How about we get out of here and you tell me what's up."

Euphie planted her feet where she was and glared at Alec. This she didn't like. "I think so." She replied, she kind of had forgotten the reason why, but it didn't matter. "Alec... what is this?"

The humor was leaving Alec's face every second longer he stayed in this hell hole of a dream. "How should I know," he said with mild irritation. "Someone with a bad past and a lot of issues. I'm not really one to ask questions about what other people have been through, that's their business." There was a slight edge in the hint he dropped with his last comment.

There was the urge to drop the issue but also to push it, Euphie wasn't sure which was the best though. She wanted to know more, she had always been the curios sort, but also at the same time... she didn't want to see Alec sad. Euphie didn't like this edge, this irritation but this was as much part of him as his usual playful tones and smiles. "We're friends, aren't we?" Euphie brushed him aside to continue looking into his dream.

Friends? Yeah... they were friends, but what exactly did that mean to Alec? At the point in time in which this dream was taking place it meant pretty much nothing. Hell, Alec hadn't made friends until Max had destroyed Manticore and set them all free, and considering how he had paid her back half the time, it had to make you wonder what kind of 'friend' he was. Even aside from the iffy subject of his friendship, being friends didn't mean you had to pour your heart out to someone. If there was one thing Alec would never do, it was open up in that unbridled fashion. He'd convinced himself of this much. "Yeah, we are," he agreed.

There was an uncomfortable pause after his words although Euphie did turn to smile widely at him. She liked Alec, it was hard not to like him really- poker game and all aside- "You really don't like this place." This meaning the dream and she gestured with one hand as a group of kids who were marching passed them by. It was unsettling in a way. So disciplined. So... robotic.

He shrugged lightly, as though it didn't bother him much. "It's kind of disturbing isn't it?" he said, still sounding like a deattached third party. "I mean, these kids doing all this. Something's not right with it." The lie which was coming out easier in a way, was becomingly increasingly painful to tell. This little scene that was playing out here was one of the reasons that he could lie with such ease, and that fact alone bothered him that that's what he was doing right now.

"No, it's not right." Euphie answered carefully, she wanted to encourage more but... "...Was this the sort of place you grew up in?" Was all his world like this? That was a scary thought... children being forced to do these sort of things.

"Me?" he echoed, his face for just a moment resembled the hardened faces of the older children that ran through the courses with ease. It broke in a moment and went back to the normal lax look of a slacker. "Nah, I didn't have the best life growing up without parents, but it wasn't anything like this," he assured her, falsely.

He was lying.

And Euphie didn't like that twisty feeling his lie gave her stomach. Alec had never given the impression of being a liar... not to her anyway, someone with many secrets yes, but not a liar. Maybe she was wrong, his face had looked.... it'd had the expression- same one- as those kids. "So what did they make you do in these places? Why?" there, she had called him on his lie without saying so bluntly.

She was wrong about one thing... Alec might have preferred to avoid the subject altogether and avoid having to lie... but he was certainly a liar. The number of lies he'd told since coming to Paradisa had been piling up at an alarming rate, and those didn't compare at all to the lies he'd told back home. No, if he could hear her thoughts now, it would be hard not to laugh, or maybe... it would be easy to shrug them off and lie in agreement that he wasn't much of a liar but had told them before. There was the truly sad thing. "You're still going on about that?" he said, teasingly. "It's really not my dream."

Well, not knowing any better was probably a good thing, Euphie wouldn't like to know that- then again maybe right now she was finding out just how much of a liar Alec could be. "Please don't lie to me."

Continuing with the lie probably wasn't going to get him anywhere as it was. Euphie wasn't buying it no matter what he said, not that he'd been trying as hard as he probably could. Still, this wasn't a situation he'd ever been prepared for in all of his training. Things like this didn't happen where he was from. Instead of saying anything, he stared at her, closed mouthed and solemn.

Euphie took a few steps closer to him until she was staring up at him, "You can tell me. I won't tell anyone, you know this." It was probably better to talk about this than to... just carry this inside.

He could tell her? Tell her what? What this all meant? What sort of screwed up past he had being used as a government assassin. Yeah, that always made a great conversation piece at parties. 'So what did you do for a living?' 'Oh me? Killed for the government after being genetically enhanced as a kid and going through intensive physical, mental and emotional training. "Not much to tell," he said, staring not at her, but at the children running around him, ignoring their presence in favor of training. Any of the would be able to see he was an X5 with a bar code on his neck, it was probably nothing at all, if they even noticed his presence in the dream to begin with.

Euphie sighed, "Alright, you grew up here, you were one of those kids. Training." So far that was the only thing she was sure, she remembered he had told her once about being a trans... transgenic was it? Something unusual, but she hadn't pressed him for answers back then. Why would you when your loss makes you say things? "Why are they being trained? A war? Experiments?" She wasn't unfamiliar with war but using children...

"Assassinations," he said, taking the first step to admitting this was his dream and part of his world. "They're being trained to be the perfect soldiers so they can take care of any people that cause problems for the government or find out too much."

There that was good. Euphie would've smiled but that didn't seem right, so instead she nodded. "It... looks like a very tough sort of training. Transgenics, right? Those kids they're not normal kids at all, are they?" They moved too fast, Euphie had noticed, they jumped abnormally high, no normal being did that. Well, not from her world...

"All of them are genetically altered." He paused, a grim smirk crossed his face before it disappeared. He'd already told her this much, why not go for broke at this point. "They're X series. See how they actually look human? It's so they can blend in with society and get to their victims that way. Nice, huh?" the biting sarcasm was obvious.

This was a side of Alec she wasn't ... surprised to see but it still bugged her, it was sad. He shouldn't have had to have gone through everything like that... "And you're ..." An X series, but she couldn't bring herself to call him that, that... no, he wasn't some experiment. He was Alec, a friend, a person. Not an experiment or an assassin or anything.

Again, she was more off than she would have thought. All he was was a transgenic, X series made to be the prefect assassin. A friend and a person was something that came later, that wasn't what he was ever suppose to be, it just seemed to happen. If things had continued the way they were suppose to, he would still be killing for the government... or dead after a failed mission once proving himself to be useless. "One of them," he finished in a monotone.

Euphie latched onto him then, hugging him firmly. "You're Alec. Not just 'one of them'. You're someone." A friend, a slacker who liked to play poker.

Alec put a hand down on her head and after a moment ruffled her hair. "I was never a very good soldier," he said, trying to make this touchy subject into a joke. "I tended to do my own thing whether they wanted me to or not."

Her hold on him tightened for a moment, just trying to offer affection that she couldn't very well convey in words before pulling back to look up and smiling a little before turning solemn, "I'm really sorry for all this, Alec."

Alec gave a light shrug. Thinking back on this wasn't really going to move his forward. "Hey, what's happened has happened. Baby steps forward into a new life and all that I suppose." He paused for a moment. "Besides, I ended up here and made plenty of friends. My lifes not all bad."

"Thank you for telling me regardless." Even if she had to pull it out of him with a little stubbornness, she appreciated the confidence, pulling away she rose to kiss his cheek in a friendly manner.

This girl never failed to amuse him. It was a courtly manner of another time that he'd never seen anyone else use. All the girls from his world either wouldn't touch him or wanted to jump into bed with him and leave the next morning. The only person he'd ever had anything similar to this with was Max. It was surprising to know he'd found someone else like that. "Yeah, yeah... Though, uh... if you don't mind not passing on the message?"

"Not a word."Euphie winked up at him, "But we better take care so not just anyone wonders in here, right?" She got the feeling Alec might not really enjoy being pestered with more questions from more people if they did.

"Yeah, I'm wondering how to do that besides staking out the place," he said with a dry laugh. He didn't really want to spend the next week or however long the castle decided to keep this up just to make sure no one saw his inner thoughts. "Think if we put up yellow police tape people would stay back?"

Euphie considered it, "Well, I guess you could lie." she did give him an uncomfortable look at that, "But... lying is not right... but...mm." she seemed thoughtful. "A police yellow line might attract more attention."

"I could," he agreed, nodding thoughtfully. "If it comes to that," he added in quickly. He was planning on lying to anyone that stepped in here anyway. Most people wouldn't start questioning him like Euphie did, and would probably believe him if he started telling them a lie or too. "Definitely no tape though."

"Well, if you stay here, I'm staying with you." Euphie declared, "You can tell me more about here." There was a lot she didn't know after all.

With an amused smile, Alec shook his head. "I think I've told you enough for now. It's a pretty long story." He pushed out his lips thoughtfully for a moment. "I'll tell you sometime. I might as well at this point."

"That won't make me leave you here." Euphie replied playfully, "So you better try something else." She could wait, "I don't mind, but I'll hold you to that. Sometime, the whole story." It would be fine. He was a friend, it wasn't like she would turn her back on him.