InsaneJournal

Who: Billy and Aura
What: A dream (Completed log)
Where: Their respective heads
When: August 10th
Warnings: None

Aura was asleep in the guest room at Simon’s childhood home. The house was entirely quiet, as it had been since she’d arrived, and she was tossing and turning on the unfamiliar bed.

When she began dreaming, she didn’t have any lucid realization of it, which wasn’t the norm for her. It also wasn’t the usual underworld landscape she generally dreamed. Instead, it was the cemetery, the one where the service had been held. At least, it started there. She padded over the lawn and across graves on bare feet, and as she walked, the scene changed. By the time she reached the hole in the ground, the one meant for the coffin, she was barefoot in a fair.

This place she knew.

The big top was visible from where she stood, dressed in her pajama pants and Star Trek t-shirt, and the smell of cotton candy and fair food was thick and realistic on the air. The voices raised around her had the familiar cadence of Mexican speakers, and she didn’t need to ask to know she was at the fair that her family frequented in her youth.

She headed toward the Midway, looking less somber and mature than she generally did.

Billy was in his chair, the one built so that he could move in it, arms low and strong where he rested them on the spokes, palms spread. As she came down the midway he was looking up at a strongman contest, unmanned though it was. He wore a thin comfortable t-shirt that looked like it had been slept in, jeans, and his worn boots. The worn boots were a good sign. At least he didn’t seem as if he was stuck; he was just moving easy.

Pushing a wheel with one hand, he turned to face her. He smiled. “Hey.” Billy liked fairs, fairs and cotton candy and popcorn and blinking lights and thrill rides. At least, he used to like thrill rides. He wasn’t sure if he still liked thrill rides.

She knew who he was, even if she wasn’t immediately aware of the strangeness of him being there. All she knew was that she was at one of the fairs of her childhood, and that the flyboy was there in a wheelchair (and even that didn’t surprise her or make her wonder about the reality of the dream.)

“Hola,” she said, speaking the language of the people around her. “Miss me, flyboy?” she asked, because she knew she’d been away somehow, though it wasn’t precisely a cognizant thing. She glanced past him at the haunted house, where the line was long, and she pondered a moment. In the end, she walked up to him, beside the chair (instead of behind it). “We’re going to the haunted house, and you’re not allowed to complain about the line,” she told him.

“It’s been a while,” he said in the way of reply. They started down the boardwalk, discarded popcorn kernels and cracker jacks crunching under wheels of his chair. “I don’t like meeting like this,” he told her, under the dinging music from the glowing mouth of the arcade that they passed a moment later. They came to a stop at the end of the line, a long series of people that he didn’t recognize.

“Like this?” she asked as they stopped a the end of the line. As they stood there, the people in front of them began disappearing, but she didn’t notice it. She just moved toward the front as they disappeared. She canted her head to the side, and she looked him a little more seriously, a little more clearly. “Why are you in the chair again? You’re walking. I know. I saw you.”

“Sometimes I get tired,” he confided. He noticed the disappearing, but he didn’t say anything; he just rolled forward as she did. “It hurts to walk, and I get tired. Not all the time.” He picked up a knee and flexed (slowly) presenting a boot toe to the star-strewn sky, then planting it back down again. He was waiting on the problem of meeting in dreams--it was his turn to be lucid, apparently.

The haunted house, which was of the walk-through variety, seemed to grow and expand to accommodate his chair at the entrance, but it escaped her notice, as things in dreams did. She pulled two tickets from the pajama pants, one for each of them, and handed them to her eldest sister (who was working the entrance). Her sister took the tickets, and wrapped her in a fierce hug, which Aura made every effort to free herself from. “Hay, Pura, ya,” she said, and her sister disappeared.

Aura took the first step into the hallway of the haunted house, which was dark, with family paintings lining the walls. In all the paintings, it was evident that someone was missing, and she turned to look at Billy. “Simon’s not here,” she said, as if explaining, then, “you’ve come a long way, flyboy. I saw you. You get around just like the rest of us.”

Billy stared for a while at the places that Simon was meant to be, but again, he resisted comment. “Not just like,” he said, gently, factually. “And not always. You’re really worried about him, aren’t you?” he asked, lifting a hand to indicate the last picture until they turned down another dark hall that Billy lit with his soft, sourceless glow.

“Simon?” she asked, then nodded. “He’s not like us.” The us clearly referred to the two of them, and not to the other family members on the wall. The glow caught her attention, and she reached out a hand to touch it as the room around them shifted to be a hall of mirrors, the glass seemingly carrying that glow down the passageway, making it decidedly less haunted and more warm and comforting. “Not strong. He’s not made for away missions, and life is one big away mission sometimes.”

The glow had no accompanying sensation. He didn’t see it quite the way she did, aware but not really aware, and looked instead at the mirrors as one morphed him into a strong lithe youth staring out at them with confused fascination. The Billy in the chair looked at the Billy in the mirror, eyes tight and hands tense on the wheels, and then he gave himself a little push, and they were moving past.

Tipping his head slightly, he then shook it. “That’s true. But people can surprise you sometimes.”

Aura reached out to touch the mirror as they passed it, noticing the hands on the wheels more than the youthful nature of the reflection. “Who hit you?” she asked, as she passed her own mirror, this one with her surrounded by a gaggle of pastel-dressed girls and looking like the odd-duckling in her black and grays.

“Don’t know. It was just a car.” He did well to separate his assailant from the vehicle. In Billy’s mind it was easier to think of what happened as a mix of events, machines gone wrong. He didn’t want to hate anybody, and he thought he would find that too easy.

“I’ll protect him,” she said, her mind back on Simon for a moment. She nodded back at the mirror. “I always knew I wasn’t like them.”

“Is that a bad thing?” Billy asked.

“No,” she admitted. “They loved me anyway,” she said with a smile. As always, she was less bitter in the dream than in reality. “I’m having trouble at Pax though,” she said, and the mirrors changed to reflect the Pax lobby as they passed them. “Do you hate whoever drove the car?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never met them.” The plural used to avoid using male or female. His face was still calm, but it creased with concern. “Maybe I would, if I did.” He took a breath of cool air that still smelled like kettle corn. “But they ran away, so. Never even found the car.” His wheels made no sound on the lobby marble. He kept trying to change the subject. “What’s the problem in Pax?”

“I don’t like anyone,” she admitted, giving him an entertained smile. It was honest, see, and Aura liked honest. “And they don’t like me. I don’t understand why they want to change everyone to be like them.” Her face, and the hallway around them, turned entirely dark and black when he said the people who had hit him had fled the scene.

“I haven’t seen anyone who wants to change you,” Billy said, frowning and braking as the light dimmed and then went out. Blinking into the darkness, he said, tentatively, “...Aura?”

“I don’t like people hurting my quasi-siblings,” she said apologetically as the darkness turned thick and dark. Once the only thing visible was his glow, everything went entirely quiet. “Do you know anything about who it was? Anything at all?”

“No,’ he said, his voice becoming uncharacteristically cold and flat. “And I don’t want to know. Just leave it alone, Aura. It’s done.” Then, attempting a gentler tone, “It’s better to let it go.”

She nodded in the darkness, and the light around them rose. The hallway around them melted into Billy’s apartment, a mirror image of the day Aura had been inside it with Simon, and she flopped on the couch and reached for a remote control which was immediately within reach. The TV across the living room buzzed to life. and an episode of The Twilight Zone filled the screen, the familiar musical intro the show softly audible in the space. “Would Merc let it go?” Then, more pensively. “Why isn’t Merc off killing people over that?”

Billy crossed his arms on his lap, staring at the screen in the chair that moved next to the chair that didn’t. “Who is he going to kill?” Faintly uncertain, he shifted awkwardly. “...We haven’t talked about it,” he admitted. “There didn’t seem to be anything to say.”

“I don’t know, but we like to hit things that hurt people we care about. I might have to have him kicked out of the familia,” she explained. The episode on the TV kept morphing from one to another as she glanced at the panel. “Where’s your guitar, flyboy?” she asked, the guitar taking its place against the wheel of his chair, propped, as if it had been there all the while.

He didn’t reach for the guitar. He wasn’t in the mood to fight the strings for a song right now. “There’s nothing to hit. Like I said, they didn’t even find the car.” He gave her a sideways look.

She reached for the guitar when he didn’t, lying it across her lap and plucking at the strings idly. “I’m having trouble with Simon,” she admitted, changing the subject, but not forgetting it.

“He won’t admit you’re his sister there,” Billy said, voice renewing again.

“He doesn’t even want me here,” she said honestly, because he had told her as much. “He’s not doing well, and I don’t know how to make it better for him. He feels guilt, and guilt in the grieving is something impossible to get past sometimes.” A pause. “I think me being around makes it worse, actually.”

Billy didn’t know what to say. “Are they mean to him?” It sounded very childish when he asked it like that, but he knew Simon wouldn’t ever admit it to him if he asked.

“No, they’re great,” she said. “Not as great as my family, but great.” Aura knew they’d both been lucky, being adopted by great people. It solidified her belief that the adoptions hadn’t been random, but she didn’t say that here. She just sighed. “You should talk to him. He listens to you.”

“I did. I didn’t know what to say.” More uncomfortable shifting.

She smiled at the uncomfortable shifting. “It’s okay, flyboy. We don’t need to get touchy feely,” she offered, tossing a pillow at his head. The apartment in the dream was warm, safe, subconsciously showing that she was comfortable with him, like this, even if he was still weirded out by the idea. “Do these still scare you?” she asked, some level of her mind catching that she was dreaming now, the scene on the television changing to the beach scene of a previous dream. “Why do you think it happens?”

The pillow bounced of Billy’s face, leaving him blinking and scowling (yet goodnaturedly) at her. He looked around the apartment, which seemed completely his in every way. “I don’t know.” Then, abruptly, “It’s not natural.”

“But it’s been happening forever,” she said, reaching down for the pillow and hugging it to her chest. “Before we met.” She paused, considered. “But not before your accident.” She was entirely quiet a moment, entirely still. “Maybe it has something to do with what I can do,” she said, still in that fuzzy dream-state where saying that was okay.

His attention sharpened. “What can you do?” He sounded, briefly, as if he wasn’t sure that he wanted to know.

“Help people die,” she said simply, as if she was admitting to having a hangnail or a kitten.

“You what?” Billy actually made as if to stand up, and it was a dream and so he did, sharply and without pain, backing up two steps and colliding with a houseplant that was prospering under one window.

His reaction jarred her from the fuzzy warmth of dreaming and sent the dream into sharp focus. Everything went sharp, and clear and a moment later they were in her underground place, at the edge of the jutting crag of rocks over a dark, dark mass of water. “It was just a dream thing,” she lied quickly. “It’s not true. No one can do things like that, flyboy. Only in my favorite television shows.”

“Then why would you say something like that?” he demanded, alarm in the edges of his eyes, the usually calm warm hazel wide and white.

The panic in her eyes was entirely real, and entirely foreign on her features. She’d had a connection with this man for years, and losing it because of something she was so careful about hiding was unacceptable. It was, in fact, the fear she always lived with. That someone would find out, wouldn’t understand, would think she was a freak, would report her to the cops. “God, I don’t know. It’s a dream,” she said voice rising an octave.

“You’re right, it’s a dream. You said you weren’t here for that. You said I wasn’t dead. You said that.” Billy’s voice was rising too, and though it couldn’t be anything like dangerous, the accusation was obvious.

“You aren’t dead. You aren’t even dying. I swear,” she said. “It’s not like that. I can’t- I mean, I don’t- I work in a hospice. I help people die. That’s all,” she explained, all in a rush of words. She was pacing now, willing them both to wake up, wake up, wake up.

He wasn’t waking up from this nightmare, not yet. “That’s why you’re here?! That’s why you’re in my head all the time? To help me die?!”

“NO!!” she insisted. “It isn’t your time.” Oh God, this was going horribly bad. She wrung her hands, and she paced. “And this is my dream. You’re in my head.”

“It’s my apartment!” he shouted at her, putting a hand back and steadying the plant to prevent it from tipping.

“Not anymore!” she said, motioning to her underground scene, the one she always dreamt, the one he’d been in before. “Listen, Billy. I’m not going to hurt you, and you’re not going to hurt me, okay? I don’t know why this is happening, but it sure as hell isn’t something Twilight Zone. It’s just some subconscious bullshit caused by tectonic plates or something.”

He took another step back from her. The cool stone alarmed him in a way it had not before. “I don’t want you in my dreams anymore,” he said, aggressively. It wasn’t a threat, not really. The glow was still there, unchanging, but his expression was all too human.

She dropped her hands when he took the step back, and her expression vacillated between hurt and resignation at this words. After all, she’d lived with the fear of this very thing as long as she could remember. She nodded finally, a jerky movement. “I’ll try,” she promised, her voice cracking on the words. She stepped back herself this time, giving him more space, and then she was gone and the dream began to fall apart into the dark, dark water.

His expression hardened, grew distant in a way that was unnatural on his otherwise warm features. He wasn’t alarmed by the water or the falling stone, and the glow never died--until he was gone.

She awoke with a gasp, and it took her a minute to acclimate herself to the guest bedroom again. She was out of the bed almost immediately, getting dressed in a panic, not thinking. She paced the center of the room after, trying to decide whether to contact Billy and joke it off, whether to stay and try to explain to Simon (Billy, she was certain, would tell him what had happened).

In the end, she grabbed her cellphone, and she dialed Billy’s cell, and she let it ring.

Billy was awake too, and he’d sat up even though it hurt like hell when he’d been still for this damn long, and he pushed his hands into his face, scraping across his forehead as his cellphone lit up. By the time he leaned far enough to pick it up and answered it, he was shaking and actively trying to prevent his voice from doing the same, so he didn’t bother to look at the caller ID. “Yeah?”

“That was just a messed up dream, right?” she asked immediately, pacing with nervousness, hoping he’d say yes, that he wouldn’t take it seriously, that she wouldn’t lose everything she cared about because of her inability to keep her sleeping mouth shut.

“It was a messed up dream,” he said, attempting not to stiffen again since it was only going to make it worse. He needed a goddamn painkiller, and moved the phone from his mouth so she wouldn’t hear him breathing hard.

She could hear, even if he didn’t want her to. “I didn’t mean to nightmare you from across the country, flyboy. Go back to bed.” Here she paused. “Still friends?”

“I want to be able to sleep without you in it,” he said, not the way he had before, not with anger. “All that stuff you said before is true, isn’t it?” He was still moving even with the phone in his hand, having found his cane and the door.

“About it being a messed up dream?” she asked hopefully, sitting on the bed. “Yes.”

“You really kill people?” He leaned against the doorframe with one solid shoulder and held himself up for a minute.

“Not like that,” she said after a very, very long pause. “I’m coming home. Meet me at the hospice day after tomorrow, and I’ll show you.” She paused. “I understand if you don’t want to, though.”

“I don’t want you to show me anything involving killing,” he said, obviously finding the idea abhorrent. “I can’t believe you.” He shook his head a little bit, the sound audible as he shoved off the doorframe with a pained grunt. “I thought I knew you.”

She tried to say something to defend herself, but she couldn’t. In the end, she muttered “I thought you did too,” her voice a hurt thing that said he should know she wouldn’t hurt anyone, and she disconnected.

She grabbed her bag, and she sneaked out of the house before Billy could talk to Simon. She couldn’t handle Simon’s rejection as well, and she wasn’t going to hang around for it.