Nexus 100 Dreams

[evillurks]

Title: Spirit of the City
Fandom: The Shadow
Characters: The Shadow (older)
Prompt: 07 Dreams
Word Count: 564
Rating: PG
Summary: A dream, and the waking after.
Author's Notes: I actually had this dream in a more vague form, as I was dropping off one night.

Locked in a grapple for the upper hand, gnarled fingers briefly lost their grip, and that was enough for the thug to break loose. The move left The Shadow poised and swaying like a pendulum at the edge of the roof. He had no time to regain his footing before the other man sprang away, fleeing to safety. One gun had remained in his hand through the fight, and his hand seemed to move on pure instinct to aim at the back of the man’s head. The recoil of the heavy automatic pushed him a last desperate inch, but he saw the bullet strike home with deadly accuracy. There was one less criminal on the streets tonight.
His view was cut off by the line of the rooftop as he fell.
The air seemed to embrace his unresisting form, and he felt no fear, only a kind of resigned satisfaction with the night’s work. He had caught the last of the men he was after, and another case was closed. Empty air whistled softly around his head, and the surrounding buildings seemed to grow skywards like emerging plants caught on a high-speed camera. The myriad lights of the city streaked upward like rockets.
When he struck the pavement, it cushioned him as if it were made of water, as if he had dropped from the briefest of heights. His body, horizontal from the plummet, sank gently and slowed as the pavement closed over him. The cement was murky, and looking up at the city through it was like looking through a fog. The view grew dimmer as he sank deeper, but now embedded in the ground he could hear and feel the thrum of the subway, the rumble of traffic and the rattle of pipes. He passed through a layer of plumbing, through the rushing air of a tunnel and the electric tingle of the tracks that lined it. Below the level of the subway his descent was slowing to a crawl. His head was filled with the throbbing life that flowed over and through the ground. As he seemed to settle, somewhere below the active layers of the underground, his arms and fingers seemed to stretch, reaching out and up. He wriggled them loosely, reveling in the sensation as they continued to grow, intangible and shapeless, intertwining up and up past pipes and cables and street. His fingers stretched up through the buildings, working their way into skyscrapers. Unleashed from the recent case, his mind and senses spread wide again, a net across the entire city, touching the life of every citizen, watching over them. Centered deep in the heart of Manhattan he cast himself around and through the city, unseen, protective, and at home.

Gradually, the face of the clock wormed its way into his brain. It had been lightening into dawn when he laid down, and now it was full morning and the city was springing into life again. His limbs felt as though they held the weight of buildings, still, dragging and making his joints grind like rusty hinges when he moved. The bruises of last night’s work began to make themselves felt as he stirred and hauled himself to the edge of the bed. The Shadow dragged himself onto his feet, and made for the kitchen with coffee a priority on his mind.
There was work to do, yet.

Comments

[sable-cloak.livejournal.com]

Wow. This, is so surreal. The fall is terrifying yet calm, he's so accepting of the event, and then the description of reaching up, and sensing the city like that is just amazing.

[evillurks.livejournal.com]

I was afraid it was too morbid, it is a death scene in a sense, but it's also only a dream and more about his relationship to the city as a protector, and how he's devoted his life to it in so many ways.