Sweet Dreams
Who: Raina (Solo) Where: Williamson Family Home When: Long past midnight
Black feathers floated through her dream, turning as they fell through the air, one catching in her hair as her eyes stared, endlessly, at the sight before her. Malevolent eyes stared back at her, fathomless ink black scored with fissures of fiery red, inhuman and furious. Set in a face of more shadow than substance, like dark smoke coiled and formed into the rough shape of a man. The creeping sense of familiarity was as strange as it was strong, heightened by the viscous feel of liquid adrenaline beginning to burn through her veins, her mind casting about for answers could only marvel in a dark horror at the monster that lived and breathed rage before her.
Ripping herself away from the eyes of pooled shadow and flame, she fled. Attempted to flee. It followed, moving like a swooping wraith, and the weighty beat of her racing heart already told her of escape’s impossibility.
Pain lanced through her, suddenly, agonizing as it tore through her body with the demon’s touch on her skin. It caught her arm and the physical anguish brought by its touch buckled her knees and brought her to the hard stone beneath her. All the while her mind screamed for her to twist away, to struggle and fight the monster that held her like an iron cage, control over her own limbs bled out of her and…
The scene changed, jarringly fast. She was no longer struggling against shaped darkness and smoke, no longer crumpled on uneven rock, but lying on flat, blank concrete. The agony that had burned through her limbs faded in a heartbeat, and she pressed her palms flat against the ground beneath her to lever herself up, needing to stand.
Light played coy in the darkness, filtering through a single small window, the watery brightness in a beam that spoke of not sunlight, but moonlight. The light of the full moon. A turn of her eyes to the right showed bars, thick and heavy, her mind whispering the answer that they were solid iron. And, with a drop of her stomach, she realized where she was standing, terror coming over her in prickles of awareness on her skin.
The snarl of something behind her, grating and feral, made her whip around instinctively to see the threat. The pale grey and black fur did not soften the washed out eyes slitted with black, yellowed teeth bared by the undiluted, mindless rage of the feline. It wasn’t a true feline, the muscles that rippled and moved under its heavy fur coat were too heavy for a true animal, and the monstrous twist on one of nature’s children was fairly salivating at the prey before it.
The iron bars hit her back, her feet having taken her backwards without her knowing, and there was nothing but thick fear as the monster that was once her sister leapt with claws and teeth bared.
The gasp of air rushing into her lungs, her body bolting up in the borrowed bed, hurt, it was so ragged and wild. Her surroundings weren’t familiar, and being unable to place where she was, at first, did nothing to calm the racing of her heart and the leftover panic from the darkness of her dreams.
It eased into her, awareness of where she was, and her breathing began to slow as she took in the details of the room around her. Oma was stirring from where she had been laying beside Bean, between the bed and the door, but Raina whispered a thought to her Familiar to go back to sleep. She didn’t want to dissect or discuss the still fresh echoes of terror, and instead pulled back the blankets that covered her to turn and set her bare feet on the floor.
It was stripped down, the room in the near-darkness, and even without Isaiah’s earlier words, she would have been able to tell that it wasn’t one he lived in any longer. A childhood bedroom he only used on occasion when it was too late to go back to his apartment. Still, there were a few mementos scattered about, and she padded over to the dresser, her eyes turning to the pictures tucked into the sides of the frame of the mirror above it. She reached out, plucking one to hold, turning it to catch what light there was the moon outside the window, moving towards that window to better see what the picture held.
A younger Isaiah was laughing, sometime midway through high school, she guessed, along with several other teenage boys. Focusing on the picture in her hands, rather than what she had dreamt, was calming, even as she recognized Isaiah’s friend, Jace, laughing alongside him in the image. He wasn’t calming.
Her eyes turned instead to look outside the window, at the partial moon in the sky, and remained there, leaning against the windowsill and holding an old picture that wasn’t hers, until morning.
She no longer wanted to sleep, she didn’t want to dream.