FicWad

in your philosophy
by Neo-rin
prologue: dream eater

The nightmares are recurring. I still get them. I get them so regularly, I should be used to them by now. I’m not. No one gets used to nightmares—not me, not you, not Genjyo Sanzo. Not even the ones who have the same nightmares, the same reason for jackknifing into a sitting position and finding the only thing that’s got a physical hold of you is the coverlet, the same thing, every night, all night. In fact, you could even say the ones who have the same nightmares over and fucking over are the ones who have no chance whatsoever of getting used to them.

There’s something about repetition in that context. Lather, rinse, repeat. Wake up, forget, sleep, dream, repeat.

Hakkai wakes up with a whisper on his lips, and I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who hears it; it’s a nightmare by itself.

And like a nightmare, a language by itself, it’s gone, fades away, dies, escapes him. After a while, it doesn’t come back. After a while, he sleeps easy, and life is good if you can watch him breathe like that. Rise. Fall. Like the tide. The whispers are gone. They escaped him.

But not me.

There’s a place, and it sure as fuck isn’t the back of a jeep with the emergency brake pulled, surrounded by people who think you’re a shithead, think it so loudly it echoes in their eyes. Actually, it’s a cottage, sort of, small in perimeter, with rotted wood floors and rotted wood walls, probably termite-infested by now, in its emptiness a syllogism of the deepest pits of a hell too personal to adequately describe with these words, with this pen, so I’ll save that, stow it for another time, a time that’ll come soon, a time when I don’t feel guilty describing the sins of the father, my father, for pulling the gun on the race of a something-thousand sperm cells aching to become the next Indian tragedy.

See, at least his death was an accident.

Hers wasn’t.

So there’s a place, right? And it always, always steals me away. And in this place, in this shithole cottage that smells like my brother’s breakfast and rain-rotted trees, I just sit on my knees and I get hit, over and over, and I break a promise I made, to myself, to my brother, and the tears don’t stop falling, except they haven’t started. There is no place. There are no tears. There are no fists and pointy ears. There is no woman in a pink dress. Only one hottie has actually dumped me and he’s sitting right in front, softly snoring (nobody’s perfect, but he’s damn close, at least), his hair like bird-feathers, blacker than the sky overhead—starless for once, so there goes one more excuse for the insomnia, down the drain, out of sight, out of mind. Fuck, I hate sleep.

And sometimes—now-times—he squeaks in his sleep and there’s that whisper, again, on his too-pretty lips, a language again, old as sin itself, and that not-woman stops hitting me; there’s a sense of urgency, there, in that not-place, in that dream, and, suddenly, I’m not the boy anymore, I’m not twelve years old and staring death in the face as though it’s the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen (and maybe, back then, it was). I’m twenty-two. I’m only as old as I feel.

I kill her.

I kill my mother, my own /mother/, like I killed her on the steps to Kami-sama’s; I smear her blood on my fingertips, feel absolutely /nothing/, and I run out of that cottage like a bat out of hell (which doesn’t make sense; bats don’t /run/) to find that, to find that language, reverberating in the unending black, that dark, dark language, the only form of communication between slayer and healer. And I wake up. And that selfsame hottie squeaks in his sleep again, and, oh, look, he’s having a nightmare.

Imagine that.