Work Text:
Nightmares are reflective of one's mind, so to say. Bits and pieces of your unconscious scattered into a dream that must mean something. If the meaning is truly there or not, that's hard to say. Albeit, a recurring nightmare with a repeated topic most definitely has one.
Towa has nightmares almost every night. Most of his nights are filled with restless sleep, when he does at all. Tonight is one of those nights.
It's a weird world, the one of the subconscious. Towa usually does not remember what he'd dreamt, but his fatigued body and pounding headache are a telltale sign.
A red room is most recurring, a body sprawled on velvety sheets of great quality. Despite the softness of the silk, the bed is anything but comfortable. It is too big, and Towa's little body feels like it's getting swallowed whole laying in it.
When the door opens with soft golden light , and when the mattress dips, Towa's body tenses instinctively. His mind doesn't understand, it never understood. How could it? The mind of a child could never truly comprehend. But his limbs go numb from the tips of his fingers before the first touch even registers.
His eyes refuse to focus properly, and the person's face is nothing more than a blur, a jumbled mess of faces morphing into and over one another, all with the same satisfactory curl of the lip. The hand's texture is both rough and soft, long and short nailed, one after the other and all at once. Towa never learned to count. He can't pinpoint the number of faces.
The walls melt away from scarlet to a duller color, and Towa's tiny hand is held gently by long, thin fingers as he gets dragged along an endless hallway. The figure's clothes sway almost hypnotically. Towa watches the woman's mouth as she talks poison with a honey like voice.
Each door they pass eeriely looks the same, numbers sitting atop wood that Towa can't read, but can tell happen to be the same. Each passing is met with screams of a child from within, a distorted moan of pain.
Towa stops in front of one of these rooms when he feels something trickle down his thigh. The hand which had been holding his is suddenly gone, leaving his own sweaty and cold. He looks down to realize that he is bleeding. A dark puddle is forming on the carpet, blood slowly dripping from between his legs and staining his doll-like clothes in impurity.
When he looks back up at the door, it no longer looks the same. There's a loud buzz coming from the room, accompanied by the stench of bleach and beeping machines. Towa gets led toward it, and there he finds a man with a white coat who's touch doesn't hurt. It greatly scares him. The man's touch is rough, his hand seemingly huge as it gently wraps around Towa's shoulder and leads him to some kind of table, white tissue laying atop as if waiting to be stained.
The little boy's stomach sinks when he is urged to lay down. He assumes that is why the touch did not yet hurt, because it was about to. The elegant clothes he once worn were now replaced by a hospital white gown and his tiny body shivered under it as a chill of air ran under akin to the breath of monsters visiting his bedside.
More of Towa's skin felt wet than it had before. His chest stung from his clavicle all the way down to his navel, giving way to a soft rising of his tummy, bruised where impact had repeatedly striked. Red liquid ran down his abdomen, coagulating together like blood sucking larva at the edges of his wounds. It felt sticky, a little warm in certain places. It could feel like an embrace if Towa closed his eyes enough to believe it so.
When the needle pricks his skin, Towa barely feels the sting. It's not pain free, but it is so very mild that he fails to register the look of worry and pity on the doctor's face. Of guilt, maybe.
In the midst of it all, someone holds his hand. It is so daringly startling that he yelps, confusion and fear of what is about to come mixing together in his core. Except nothing happens, the hand doesn't travel astray, and Towa is left to wonder just what kind of mind game this man is playing at. Perhaps a new kind of play he did not know about? He had no answer.
Back in the red room, the figure melts away and another hand takes grip of his own with no trace of gentleness. It is violent, so much so that Towa wonders how close his bones are to breaking. Here, he is watched with eyes like a hawk's by all kinds of monsters. Piercingly, their gazes devour his body like it isn't a body at all, but a vessel to be desired carnally, deviantly.
Screams of his mother's name die on his tongue like poison.Towa had learned not to fight or scream a while ago, so instead he just lays quiet, as quiet as a child can be sprawled all over silky sheets.
The more his body fills with heart racing anxiety, the more Towa's brain wonders further from the room to the dancing lights on the ceiling. Shapes out of this world, morphing, spasming, as if to entrance his child mind.
Even with his mind gone far, his body tingles painfully, aches and sores remain plastered on his pale skin. Scars litter his form as cracks and scratches linger on a porcelain doll's surface, reminders forever embedded into skin. Even with his mind unwilling, the body never forgets.
The memories dissipate as soon as he wakes, left with just a hazy mind and a growing headache. The TV buzzes softly as it always does.