Alexandria Rose Nash | Urðr (![]() ![]() @ 2011-08-14 20:06:00 |
![]() |
|||
![]() |
|
![]() |
|
![]() |
Entry tags: | jormungandr, urdr |
on candystripe legs the spiderman comes...
Who: Alex and Adam
What: Alex has a nightmare and needs half-nekkid snuggles! >.>
Where: 504
When: July 19, 2011, before this and this, but right after this!
Notes: Shoulda done a placeholder for this one! Sorry lovemuffins!
The nightmares were getting worse.
It was a progression. She’d tried to start keeping notes on the dreams, but in the beginning, they were always vague, dark, leaving her with an unsettled sense that she couldn’t define. When she tried to write about it, stranger visions came to her, and she was assaulted with visions of herself writing over and over and over, her buying the pen, and ultimately nothing of consequence.
As the nightmares got worse, they became more vivid, more detailed, and she’d taken to dictating what she could remember of them into her computer, since it seemed as though she could manage to touch the mouse and dampen the visions enough to be able to let go and just talk. Half the time, though, she sounded like a fucking psychotic, and hearing herself talk about it into an empty room scared her even more.
So she texted Adam.
She hadn’t been able to tell him much about the dreams, because she hadn’t been able to tell much herself. She never texted when she really thought he might be sleeping, and sometimes didn’t when she knew he’d be awake. But when they were really bad, the only way she could seem to get back to sleep was after talking about it with the one person who knew most of the story, and didn’t think she was certifiable.
So she’d thrown her Penn hoodie over her tank top and pulled a pair of sweat pants stolen from her brother over the boxers she’d been sleeping before grabbing her keys, sliding on a pair of flip flops, then walking across the hall to Adam’s apartment, where she knocked on the door with a hand less steady than she would have liked.
He was tugging on a pair of pyjama bottoms as he opened the door, more concerned with the tone of her text than with any semblance of modesty. He had slithered straight from his bed upon hearing her ringtone, slitted black eyes seeking out the small screen, hands blindly reaching for the nearest essentially suitable clothing. Now, standing before her small wisp of a frame, what little self consciousness he might have felt disappeared entirely. His bare arm slipped around her shoulders, ink to flesh as he drew her inside, one foot raising to kick the door closed.
“You look OK,” he said, a confirmation meant for his own benefit more than hers. Her text had been vague, after all, and unpleasant visions of terrifying clarity had danced through his mind since receiving it. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” she mumbled, leaning into him despite the sullen dismissal. “Nightmare,” she went on to clarify. It felt stupid to bother him in the middle of the night over a nightmare, but it had seemed so real. Everything was wrong. Being in his apartment though, next to him, his arm around her, was a comfort, despite her conflicted feelings about asking too much of him.
“You’re always taking care of me,” she observed as they moved further into the apartment, but she didn’t move far from his side, reaching over to hold the hand that held him to her. “When did I turn into such a damn damsel in distress?”
Despite her words, when they reached his couch, she sat down directly next to him, and curled up close, looking at the ink on his arm. “I’m sorry. I’m just starting to think that I may actually losing my mind, on top of being afraid to go to sleep.”
His brow had furrowed at her harsh self assessment, feeling her judgment entirely undeserved. Her fears, too, he considered unfounded, though it was difficult to dismiss the latter as easily as the former. He flicked his labret with the tip of his tongue, putting unpleasantly ponderous thought into her words. “You’re stressed out,” he said, squeezing her close. His voice was still raspy from sleep, scratching past thinned and vaguely downturned lips. “Did you go to the doctor after--” His voice caught as he thought of her collapsing in the lobby, spasms of pain racking her body -- “The other day?” The pad of his thumb brushed over her skin, stroking softly, carelessly, over her. “Stress can do weird things. Even cause really awful nightmares.”
“I woke you up, you liar,” she said without heat, nestling closer to him. Despite Adam being the one person in the world with whom she had a prayer of feeling comfortable talking about this with, it still wasn’t comfortable, and it still wasn’t easy. Adam easily read the lingering tension in her body against his; he held his silence, hoping it would coax her into some kind of calm.
“I went. She said everything looked fine. Doing some bloodwork, I guess, but she doesn’t expect to find anything. I don’t really expect her to, either.” Alexandria took a breath and shook her head. “I almost don’t even care about that anymore -- once I recovered, it was done. But these dreams...” She shook her head.
“They get worse and worse. This horrible thing... I don’t know what it is. Us, but not us, but being -- eaten, I guess. By the thing. Recently more vividly. An island.”
She looked up at him. “I don’t know.”
The deep crease in his pale forehead had hardly lessened. Though he would have liked to consider her dreams just that and no more, even cold logic told him otherwise. Since coming to Pax Letale they had both experienced things that should not be, seen and felt things that came from somewhere other than themselves. Too, her reaction to these nightmares was so strong, so sincere, that Adam found he could not begin to dissemble. Almost more unsettling was the fact that among his workplace compatriots the island was fast gaining a terrible, tangible reputation; with increasingly unusual events occurring in the island’s vicinity, there was truly no way to comfortably assume the problem lay entirely in Alexandria’s head. To Adam’s dismay, this realization in no way diminished his concern.
“Us but not us,” he repeated, turning over in his mind that carefully chosen phrase. He hated to ask, felt ridiculous even considering it, but the longer he waited, the more he realized it could not remain unsaid. His voice was hushed when he spoke again. “Was it what we saw in the mirror?” he asked. “That... snake?”
She nodded, curling close to him. “The snake, but it was you. It was... I can’t explain it. And I was that strange gaunt thing.” She plucked absently at the leg of his pyjama pants closest to her. “But that wasn’t the bad part. If anything, that was the only good part -- you were there, even if you were a snake. But there was this other thing... a... I don’t know. Maybe a wolf. Maybe something else. I remember thinking there was no reason to run from it, but we did. Well, you slithered. You were huge, then small, then you wrapped around my wrist, and I ran and ran, but it got closer. I could hear it, smell it. You can’t smell in dreams, there’s no smelling,” she said, turning to him, her green eyes wide and full of lingering vestiges of acute fear.
“I think we were on the island,” she said. “And something - something was keeping us there. Then we were in the water, and I swam and I swam, and... I lost you. I lost you, then...” She shook her head.
“I drowned.”
Adam made a conscious effort to relax his jaw, realizing only too late that it had tightly, visibly clenched. It was not the dream that disturbed him; that he could set aside easily enough, trusting to his rational mind to shut it out as the irrational vision it simply had to be. (Eventually it would come creeping back, seeping into his thoughts like blood beneath a bruise, but that was a fear for another time, when she was not here and in such need of him.) But the vehemence of her belief in the dream, the certainty of its realness to her - that was what he found most troubling, and what he now could not put out of his mind. Later they could address the surreal nature of the dream, and the still more surreal understanding that it could perhaps in part be true.
“Well,” he began, his voice scarce above a whisper. “Now we know it was a dream.” His fingertips skimmed over her flesh, trailing meaningless patterns on her pale skin. “You know you’d have to work harder than that to lose me. I’m a pretty good swimmer, after all.”
Thin fingers found her hair, coiling loosely in dark locks. “Do you think trying to interpret it would help?” he asked. “Maybe if you see those things as symbols... giant wolves, snakes, gaunt figures... they’ll seem less real.” He wanted to add, Because they can’t be, but something deep within him knew it for a lie.
A frown furrowed her brow and she pulled back, shaking her head. For months, while she’d been abroad, she’d had no crazy dreams, no visions, no strange, hallucinatory experiences. But as soon as she’d gotten back to California -- to Pax -- they were back, and stronger than ever. Something very vocal in her demanded she examine the possibility that they were real, but everything else in her rebelled so violently at the idea, her lips thinned into a line, and she stopped shaking her head. “I don’t... I guess I probably have some anxiety about school. My dissertation or something.”
She took a breath.
“Maybe I should go on leave for the fall. It’s not too late.”
Adam drew a quiet, shallow breath, dark eyes studying her face as she drew away. A part of him felt assured that time away from the inevitable pressures of her studies would do little good; after all, sooner or later she would have to return to them. But the larger part of him wanted only to see her contented again, to see her relieved of the stress that drained away so much of what was most vital in her. A sabbatical could provide her the time she needed to recover from this, allowing her to return to her work with a clear head and renewed focus. But it was difficult to know the most likely outcome, or to guess what the best course of action might be. Not for the first time he wished he’d been granted some kind of foresight, that he might know how to guide her toward the proper path. Lacking such direction, frustrated by his helplessness, Adam squeezed her arm and merely said what he could.
“If you really think that would help, I’m all for it.” There was less conviction in his voice than he intended. “Is there someone at school you can talk to about it? An advisor or something?”
“I don’t know,” she mumbled. “I guess.”
Her body curled closer to his again, though she turned her gaze down to her hands and pulled her legs closer to herself. She didn’t want to talk to her advisor or anyone else. She felt irrational and out of control, and just the thought of confessing any of this to anyone else was mortifying all on its own. It might be better to push through, keep working, and see a therapist on the sly. The only problem was if she were medicated, would she still be able to work? The intensity of the visions -- or hallucinations -- was so strong that she imagined it would take something fairly serious to diminish their effects. She took a deep breath.
“I’m just talking,” she said finally. “I’ll be fine.”
At last he had an answer that required not a moment’s thought. “I know you will.”
Still, in spite of his certainty on this point, questions remained. There was far too much silence between her responses, too much that was going unsaid. His arm snaked around her narrow shoulders, squeezing her tight; he felt some small comfort in the fact that she still sought solace in him, accepting what small consolation he could give. “You can stay the night here if you need,” he said. He cleared his throat, himself a little uncomfortable with the suggestion. Though their relationship had progressed somewhat, it had been by excruciatingly slow degrees, careful explorations they did not often acknowledge outside the moments in which they occurred. Now more than ever he wanted to set her at ease, showing her all the support she deserved without even a hint of untoward expectations. “I can sleep on the couch if you’d like,” he added, a moment too late. “At least that way if you woke up or anything, you’d have someone here.”
Her first instinct was to refuse on principle; she didn’t want him to feel obligated, or as though he had to take care of her. At the same time, going back to her own, dark apartment seemed like too much to face. The prospect of falling asleep next to Adam, with her arm around him, the warmth of his body close to her, was too alluring to ignore. She couldn’t imagine another scenario in which she’d feel safer or more secure. Thoughts of how to deal with this would be easier to come by if she’d at least had something resembling a full night’s sleep, and at this point, it seemed much more likely that she’d get that curled up next to Adam than alone in her empty bed, watching shadows on the ceiling while her mind raced in lightning-fast loops.
“I don’t want you to sleep on the couch,” she said quietly. “I mean. If it - can I just sleep next to you? Or try to sleep?”
Adam tried to ignore the sudden thumping of his heart, that arrhythmic catch that beat so hard it threatened to make itself known even to her. He realized then how much he had missed her, the demands of their work having kept them apart far too long for his liking. He tried not to answer too quickly, to seem too desperate for the attention he longed to give and get in return. He swallowed hard, wondering if his silence was being taken for deliberation, cold feet, or worst of all, pending refusal. He gave her another tight squeeze, a small smile quirking his lips. “Of course you can,” he said. He risked a slight lean closer toward her, his lips pressing a soft and hesitant kiss to the top of her head. “As often and as long as you need.”
Some part of him wanted to wait there, to drag this moment out as long as he could. Though he hated to see her upset, it was good to have her here, to feel her in his arms again after so long. And his own selfish desires aside, if he did not act in her interests morning would come all too soon, finding her exhausted thanks to his own thoughtlessness. He drew a deep breath, exhaling on a sigh.
“Come on,” he said, soft fingertips squeezing lightly at her arm. “Let’s get you to bed. Do you want to take anything? Melatonin or something?” He flashed an off-kilter smile as he lifted them from the couch. “I hear warm milk helps, but since I don’t have that, maybe a shot or two of vodka would do the same?”
Rising as he did, she gave him a little smile to match his own and said, “Melatonin would be great. You know vodka only makes you sleep well for the first hour or two.” It was a relief that he’d accepted her proposal, that he’d stay with her through the night. She slipped her hand into his, lacing their fingers and moving toward his bedroom. The sense of comfort and rightness she felt when she was with him was unlike anything she’d felt, other than with her sisters and Jamie, and they were all so far away these days. And of course, the sense she got with Adam included an element that was not at all fraternal, and that was a comfort, too -- probably because he never pushed or pressed -- things were as they were and it was good. She’d missed him so deeply when she was gone; everything made sense with him, everything felt good with him. The progress of their relationship, the small changes that were happening between them, felt organic and right. And the thought of spending the night with him made something in her flutter like mad. The thought made her smile, and she turned her head toward his shoulder to nuzzle him.
“You’re too good to me, you know.”
He slowed at the entrance to the kitchen, ducking inside just long enough to retrieve a bottle of water from the fridge. “Only as good as you deserve,” he said, his voice soft, drifting toward her from the relative safety that distance allowed. The quiet words made her smile in the dim light. Why it remained so difficult to speak such things was beyond his understanding; though by and large he felt content with their relationship’s trajectory, he longed for the day they might speak more freely, unafraid of how she might respond. With quietly shuffling steps he rejoined her, handing her the water as he slipped his arm low around her back. Easily, she fell back in step with him with a soft exhalation.
In the silence of his bedroom he at last pulled away, black eyes scanning the moonlit space for anything too mussed or out of place. But his was a neat existence, tidier than his outward appearance might lead others less familiar with him to expect; there was nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to straighten before allowing her to see. Her little smile reappeared. His sheets were mussed where he had risen in haste. He walked past them, stopping alongside the headboard, and drew from the bedside table a small bottle of pills.
“Here,” he said, handing her two, their fingers brushing softly as he did. That done, he returned to the bed, the old frame creaking beneath his weight as he sat. “You know you’re welcome here any time.” It seemed to go without saying - or at least he hoped it did - but he felt better having said it aloud. “I’m glad you texted.”
“Thank you, Adam,” she said quietly, taking the pills, tamping down the little frisson of excitement at that small touch. It must have been odd, how easily he affected her, and she wondered again at his patience, or if he still wanted her, or what if anything was between them now. But she brushed these strange, sleepless thoughts away. He’d taken her in when he didn’t have to. He kept welcoming her in, despite the trouble she brought with her. “It... it really means a lot.”
With that, she took the pills, chasing them with a long swig of water, somehow already feeling calmer, sleepier. Most likely a psychosomatic effect, but she appreciated it all the same. Everything about being in Adam’s space made her feel right, especially here, in Pax. It seemed impossible that a place where so many unsettling things had happened still felt so much like home. Moving over to the undisturbed side of the bed, she slipped off her hoodie, hanging it carefully on the knob of his closet door, and set her bottle of water down. Then it was just a matter of pulling back the covers and slipping into his bed, where she instinctively moved closer to his side of it, as though some of his lingering warmth remained. She looked up at him from there, her head on his unused pillow, and reached her hand out.
“Come to bed?”
He tried to ignore the quickening of his pulse those few small words caused, but it was a difficult thing with his hand slipping into hers. They fitted too neatly together, as if they were made so, a truth made only more clear as he joined her beneath the sheets, his body pressing close to hers, feeling the subtle heat of her so close at his side. He drew a slow and deliberate breath, willing himself to calm. How easily, then, did his arm slip beneath her slender shoulders, scooping her up in his arms, drawing her close to his naked chest. So many times they had catnapped together, nodding off on one couch or another; but this was something altogether different, something new and untested, and Adam knew without a moment’s contemplation it was right.
Eyelids heavy, his body sinking already into the thick mattress, he turned his dark head and pressed a kiss to her temple. His lips parted, and by some miracle of unconscious thought he held back the words he wanted to say. “Sweet dreams,” he said instead, allowing himself one last kiss before stilling altogether.