Work Text:
“My dear Sword, I know you’ll find this, because you’re probably worried that I haven’t attended the fights lately. I know it hurts, but I need you to understand… first, how it started…”
The nightmares began to grow so intense that the pills stopped working. Sleepless nights piled up one after another, and exhaustion started to mark every gesture of the poor doctor. His eyes sank deeper, his hands trembled at the slightest effort of holding a cup of coffee, and the thought of sleeping felt as distant as it was impossible. The incident at the church was the final straw: he nearly fell asleep in the middle of mass, in front of everyone. That moment of humiliation, the whispers, the curious stares… it all finally forced him to admit that he couldn’t go on like this. The next day, he called his psychiatrist and confessed that the pills were no longer helping.
The doctor listened carefully, weighing every word as fatigue slipped into the inphernal’s voice like a fractured echo. When he finished speaking, the psychiatrist wrote something in his notebook, looked up, and explained that they would try a stronger dose. They still couldn’t do anything about the nightmares, but at least they might help him sleep again, even if only for a few hours of peace. Medkit nodded without conviction, more out of resignation than hope. He took the prescription with trembling hands, folded it, and slipped it into the pocket of his coat. That night, as the clock slowly struck ten, he uncapped the bottle and stared at the pills resting in his palm, as if unsure whether he truly wanted to dream again. Then he sighed… and decided to begin.
The pills began to take effect faster than expected. The real world slowly faded, sinking into a thick, unnatural silence. It wasn’t an ordinary dream, but a controlled descent into a place where shadows breathe and memories return with a will of their own. The psychiatrist had assured him that these pills would improve his rest, but he never mentioned what he might encounter in the middle of that artificial calm: something that waited patiently in the darkness.
At first, everything seemed quiet. The room distorted around him, the walls stretching as if they had a pulse, and the air trembling with a distant murmur. Then he felt it a presence that needed no introduction. There it stood, among the dreamlike fog, without a defined face, yet unmistakable. It did not move, did not speak, it only watched. Its form was blurred but recognizable, covered in tones that seemed gray like the Blackrock uniform, with horns not quite as sharp and a reddish hue the same ones that once belonged to… Subspace.
And even though every part of his mind screamed at him not to, he took a step toward him, slowly reaching out in an attempt to touch him, but the shadow noticed