Narrative: Gathering Shadows Who: Alex White What: Gathering shadows Where: His bedroom When: Late last night/early this morning Warnings/Rating: None
He comes awake with a jolt, as if startled out of a bad dream. He doesn't remember the dream, even if there was one, just the sense that something is different. The room is dark and he's twisted around in his blankets. They're smothering in their weight and heat and he tries to kick them away, fling them away from arms and legs but nothing wants to move. He's heard of this before: sleep paralysis. Being half-asleep, half-awake, but somehow fully aware. I'm still dreaming, he thinks.
Alex calms down a little; putting a name to a thing does take the edge off the fear. And yet, he's still tangled up, stifled. The only thing he can seem to move are his eyes, and they take inventory of the dark bedroom from where he is laying on one side in the bed. It's dim, but his eyes can make out the familiar shapes: the table and the lamp, his computer and monitor an uneven tower of plastic and glass. Everything seems normal, and yet…not.
From the corner of his eye he catches a movement, a wrongness. Something creeping toward him, just beyond the periphery of his vision. He can't will himself to move, but he can feel it like a stalker's eyes, taking the measure of him from hiding, a shadow within a shadow. It comes into view and his breath stops, but it's just that: a shadow. Lengthening out from a corner of the room like the light is changing, like the hallway light is on and someone's opened the door. But neither of those things have happened. It's just a shadow, and it's off. It doesn't fit the light sources or the objects in the room.
Anxiety shivers down his shoulder blades and cold sweat beads under his forehead under a tangled mess of blond hair. In his rising panic he pushes the idea of the shadow away from him, willing it to retreat back into the corner. To go back where it came from.
And the strange thing is, it does.
Alex's breath stills in his throat. He can't see the odd shadow any longer, he wills himself to wake up fully because this is exactly the kind of dream he would really like no part of, thank you very much. Like a spell being broken he can finally move, and he kicks the blanket, hot and cloying, away from his bare skin. The underlying chill of the room combines with the sweat on his skin to make him shiver and he sits up, scrubbing a hand through his tousled hair as he gazes warily into the corner. There's nothing there. Nothing unusual at all. But he can remember the shadow, creeping out…
And it does, again, sliding toward him, drowning what it touches in darkness. Alex scrambles away and gets to his feet, but as soon as he wonders what it was he'd done before, the shadow slides back away.
Watching it, he thinks, with no small amount of trepidation: Come closer.
The shadow obeys, slinking out of the corner like a nervous cat, making its hesitant way across the room. Alex stretches out his hand, and it curls around his fingers, then his forearm. It's creepy, but kind of cool.
Go away. It retreats.
"Shit," he breathes. He doesn't know what this is, but he finds out quickly that he absolutely is controlling it. He experiments some more and discovers he can completely cloak himself in shadows, pulled from other parts of the room. There's no real feeling to it, just a visual dimness, like standing in any sort of shadow would give a person. He can send them away, but he can't banish them any smaller than what they start out as. He turns on the light, and he can bend the new shadows, extend them, even make shapes. He goes into the bathroom, and finds that it's too bright for this newfound trick to work effectively.
He spends the rest of the night playing with the shadows in his apartment. He doesn't know what he's found, but it's kinda cool. Maybe a little unusual, but he's already been that, his whole life.