Work Text:
Before, he used to have nightmares about silly stuff. Funny stuff, like forgetting to study for a test, or going to college without any clothes on, or, sometimes, when Jean-Claude has had one of his crazy moods again and wants to 'catch up' with modern time, he lands in some cheesy horror-movie and gets chased by monsters that he could beat to a pulp in real life.
(The cool thing about a werewolf, aside from getting to hang out with people like Jean-Claude, is that, really, a whole list of things he used to be scared of has vanished.)
(That's what he thought at first, anyway.)
Stuff Happened, as it always does, like there's some divine power Up There that's decreed that people aren't allowed to feel happy or carefree for too long. Jason has accepted that ages ago, actually, so he guesses he could have known that his enjoyment in being a werewolf and able to kick nearly everyone's butt wouldn't last either.
He supposes that maybe it's human, this striving for happiness, but then he remembers Richard, and Marcus, and Nathaniel, and Stephen, and he thinks that maybe, it's the other way around, and he's just some sort of freak for thinking otherwise.
Anyway, he got into some deep trouble, only Richard and Anita Blake, who turned out not to be quite as scary as he'd always thought she'd be, at least not when you're on the right side, and some other guy named Ted got him out of it, and after that, he became the pomme de sang of the Master of the City, so it looked like he'd gotten pretty lucky. Again.
Sometimes he woke up from one of his funny, silly nightmares, but they never were about hunters being after him with nets and guns, so usually, if Jean-Claude was there, he'd tell him about them, and they'd laugh about them together (or chuckle, or smile, since Jean-Claude's kind of too cool to laugh outright). When he woke up alone, which was more often than not, actually, but those times with Jean-Claude remained stuck in his memory, he'd go drink a glass of water and sleep on after that. No biggie.
It's different now.
Now. After.
He wakes up screaming, crying, and there's nobody there, and he's too scared to go back to sleep, because he thinks he'll go insane if he ever sees that again, feels them again.
He wakes up sobbing, and from time to time, Jean-Claude is there to hold and soothe him, but there's a hint of coldness to the voice that tells him he should get over it, and a glimmer of rejection, of having weighed him and finding him lacking in Jean-Claude's expression.
That nightmare's worse than any other dream, really, because he can't wake up from it.
And slowly, bit by bit, the feeling creeps up on him that he might be going insane if this keeps going on.