Chapter Text
He was having the dream again.
Once more he found himself in the dark, smoky underground room of Lelouche, Tharbad's notorious nightclub. He sat by the bar, one hand shaking a smooth cocktail by the narrow glass stem, expectantly watching the stage. The performance hadn't started yet. Sleazy jazz music piped up from the orbal record player to put the punters in the mood for the upcoming show.
Renee Kincaid didn't frequent places like this as a rule. Something classier would have suited his style, like sitting in the lobby of Hotel Al Jumeirah while the President took part in sensitive diplomatic talks with Elsaim royalty. He only went here as part of undercover missions to observe political correspondants with shadier tastes, or when meeting discretely with someone useful but sketchy like Van Arkride. Before he'd started to notice the pattern and realise he was dreaming, he'd assumed he was here for the same sort of business. Then his over-analytical, never-quite-sleeping brain had realised that, whatever it said about him, his dreams kept taking him back here. Maybe he needed more time off work, a chance to relax and let loose, away from his employer's constant scrutiny?
Considering who was usually on the stage when the spotlights had stopped spinning around and the pole rose from the floor to the ceiling, he suspected his unconscious mind was trying to tell him something else.
The music resumed from its dramatic pause and was now speeding up in time with the pole dancers as they twirled and gyrated, veils, ribbons and hair whipping around. The lead dancer cast off their veil, letting it flutter off the stage into the crowd, who applauded rapturously.
Kincaid could never see the rest of the people in the room. Even the bartender was just a hand offering him a drink. The camera of the dream was definitely focused on himself and that lead dancer. That was how Kincaid, who normally noticed everything, could tell it was a dream. He couldn't even concentrate on the backing dancers, could not have told you anything about them afterwards.
Maybe that was just the intense distraction of recognising the lead dancer on the stage before him, a lithe, androgynous figure with a shock of fiery red hair, tantalisingly wrapped up in more red silk veils and ribbons that flurried like flames as he danced with fierce grace.
Noticing Kincaid's intense gaze, Lechter winked salaciously and stretched out an arm beckoningly, like someone who either smelled a really big tip in their future or maybe something more.
Kincaid found himself drawn closer by both fate and his own will, as if some Wind or Space orbal arte was dragging him towards the stage. Lechter opened his mouth to whisper something unheard over the music. The gravity between them was palpable.
Help me...
Well, that was new. Kincaid blinked. It took all his prodigious mental concentration to keep the dream lucid. Usually this was the part where their lips brushed like smoldering velvet, or Lechter began taking off more and more of the veils until Kincaid woke up breathing heavily with a red face. That part was surprisingly realistic but he'd never heard audible dialogue before.
Even more unusual, the voice wasn't Lechter's. It was a very high pitched female voice, almost mousy. One of the backing dancers had leaned over with impressive dexterity for someone in a large, bulky Mishette suit. Now that was something he'd definitely never seen before - what the hell was wrong with his unconscious mind? The dancer whispered again, her costume's mouth so realistically synched with her words that he began to wonder if it was really a costume.
It's got my brother... it's coming for me too...
This would have been scary, had it not been perfectly obvious by the dream's logic, which was stripping away his every attempt to remain lucid and maybe focus the camera a little better on Lechter's firm posterior. The more he tried to alter the dream, the more it fought back, like a skilled counter-hacker during an Orbal infiltration mission gone south. He couldn't help but look back at the face of Mishette.
He knew now it was the real Mishette, and that it made perfect sense for there to be such thing as a real Mishette.
Help us... Renee Kincaid...