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Ongoing things. Potentially scary/weird.
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INTERLUDE CONT'D.
She tries to bolt to her right but when she turns her head there is emptiness. Her dream is incomplete, still loading. She looks at the abyss and runs toward it, away from the threat, but she simultaneously sees him reach one arm out to grab her. She doesn't see this with her eyes because her head is pointing a different direction, but she sees it nonetheless and she sees it well.
His movement is crisp and trained, like a snake lunging for prey. Only the muscles that absolutely must move do move, and only then with great precision.
Nell's back is to a wall now, and she is in Ben's underground home. Ben is in the corner, a broken and tangled heap of wires and servos and circuits. The Afterdark is still holding on to Nell's arm. She can't tell if it's hurting, but thinks it must be almost to its breaking point the way he's got his hand clamped down on her flesh.
He steps so that he blocks her view of Ben's body--what Nell thinks of as Ben's corpse--and he draws her up to her full height and, leaning down, kisses her.
She is repulsed. It's not a real kiss. Nell Conrad has never kissed anyone, nor has she ever been kissed by anyone, and all she knows is what she sees on televisions in electronics store windows, sees in photographs in newspapers, witnesses happening fleetingly in alleyways between prostitutes and Johns. So her dream is fuzzy and awkward, and this haziness makes it terrifying.
It's scary because Nell doesn't understand. She simply doesn't have the experience to understand a kiss, and it doesn't help that in her mind she associates kissing with sex and associates sex with rape, which is her greatest fear.
Ongoing things. Potentially scary/weird.
==========
INTERLUDE CONT'D.
She tries to bolt to her right but when she turns her head there is emptiness. Her dream is incomplete, still loading. She looks at the abyss and runs toward it, away from the threat, but she simultaneously sees him reach one arm out to grab her. She doesn't see this with her eyes because her head is pointing a different direction, but she sees it nonetheless and she sees it well.
His movement is crisp and trained, like a snake lunging for prey. Only the muscles that absolutely must move do move, and only then with great precision.
Nell's back is to a wall now, and she is in Ben's underground home. Ben is in the corner, a broken and tangled heap of wires and servos and circuits. The Afterdark is still holding on to Nell's arm. She can't tell if it's hurting, but thinks it must be almost to its breaking point the way he's got his hand clamped down on her flesh.
He steps so that he blocks her view of Ben's body--what Nell thinks of as Ben's corpse--and he draws her up to her full height and, leaning down, kisses her.
She is repulsed. It's not a real kiss. Nell Conrad has never kissed anyone, nor has she ever been kissed by anyone, and all she knows is what she sees on televisions in electronics store windows, sees in photographs in newspapers, witnesses happening fleetingly in alleyways between prostitutes and Johns. So her dream is fuzzy and awkward, and this haziness makes it terrifying.
It's scary because Nell doesn't understand. She simply doesn't have the experience to understand a kiss, and it doesn't help that in her mind she associates kissing with sex and associates sex with rape, which is her greatest fear.
