Re: Eames/Holly: dreaming
The youth was ropey muscle around tight-knotted bone and anticipation wetted like a blade. Sad E knew well enough, and he knew angry. He knew the way it sounded, heavy and wet when a fist made contact with a cheek, with a stomach, when a boot hit a belly. He knew the way a knife sounded as it punched through skin. He knew the sound of broken bones and lost teeth. It was a song E had heard over and over until he knew it better than the alphabet. The man in the dream was someone else's nightmare: E hovered in the in-between child and adulthood, when a boy learned man was fallible.
He emerged from the side of the bed and E threw himself sideways, at the man's knees and center of gravity rather than swinging out wildly. It was perhaps not the most tactful of takedowns, but it used body weight effectively, and E hit with quick, sharp strikes and the targeted bile of youth that had felt the nightmare grip the back of his neck with teeth before, and was determined to break every single one. There was a hot roar at the back of him, and E left the man panting, blood-limned teeth and alcohol-soaked anger and pelted after the Captain who had, as E had expected, legged it.
He threw himself down, down and down and the sweat bloomed under his arms and at the back of his neck and he fell with the ungainly lack of grace and his knuckles skin-broken and spackled with blood, and old bruises soft and dark like plums on the back of his arm, on his shoulder, high on his cheekbone, yellowing and ugly. E slid in and out of focus, boy and man, and boy sharp and clear again and stared at the livid yawn of red that was whatever it was.