Chapter Text
The dream is always the same.
She is lying in the dirt somewhere: a halfway place between the earth and the sky, and a ditch for a grave; and there is the smell of gasoline in the air and blood beneath her fingertips and flames. Angry, orange shades that lick across her skin and dance there, blazing to the song of her flesh as it burns, burns, burns, until suddenly, it doesn’t.
It stops.
A man stares back at her from across the clearing.
He wears a cover and shades, and it is hard to make out any parts of him that are not more than a blur or shadows, but even with her clouded mind and the lapses of his name, she can still feel him. She knows this man’s touch somewhere deep within her bones. She knows the rumble of his laugh and the taste of his smile, and his love, deeper still. And his soul.
She doesn’t know how she knows these things. So little of her mind has been salvaged from the time before he found her, and it is just a dream, after all, but somehow she does. As if she is sure of anything, it is this.
The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and this man is hers.
And his soul is her home.
He too, is covered in flames—a bullet hole gaping through his sternum—and at the site of his unmoving body, her fervor lurches.
Her own pain diminishes to nothing and instead, there is only the need to be near him. To draw him into her arms and smother the blaze within her limbs. To drain the blood from her veins and feed it to his heart so he is the one still beating.
She tries to reach out to him.
She tries to bury her nails into the soil and pull herself forward; dragging, crawling, as if she is an infant deigned to nothing more, but then he’s too far gone. Blink, and he’s a meter away, a hundred, a kilometer, looking right at her but still never moving. Still never close enough.
And she tries to scream.
She tries to howl and cry herself coarse, but somehow she knows that doing so is her most useless attempt. She can feel the anguish building in her chest and knocking against her ribs, begging for a freedom that never comes. She opens her mouth, and nothing comes out.
The silence wraps itself around her throat and tightens, forcing itself down, down, until she is condemned to it even in her dreams.
It is not until sometime later when the heat has gone cold and the rain comes instead, that she realizes the dream is not really a dream at all. And not a nightmare either, but a memory.
A haunting.
The emptiness is too consuming.
The ache is too real.
The scars remain atop her skin long after she wakes, and the recollections that lead to it, no matter how many days pass, never surface.
She is still just as lost the moment she opens her eyes as when she closed them. No matter how many times the cycle ends just to begin again.