Sweet Dreams (Criminal Minds, prompt #26) Title: Sweet Dreams Fandom:Criminal Minds Characters/Pairing: Elle Greenaway Rating: PG-13 Word Count: 160 Challenge/Prompt: #26 -surrender Summary: It's just a dream.
This is a dream, Elle tells herself. Just a nightmare. She can never understand, when she wakes, why knowing, within the dream, that it is just a dream, doesn't help, doesn't make it any less terrifying.
It's that day again, and she's in her house, again, and there's the man with the gun, and she can't move, again. In a dream, it's okay to be paralysed. It's not real, there's nothing at stake. But the thing is (and it's the thing she can't get past), when it was real, when the man with the gun was in her house and it wasn't just a dream, the day it happened, well, she couldn't move then, either.
She sat, frozen, nothing in her head but pure, cold terror, rooting her to the spot.
She didn't do anything. She didn't do anything.
And so, she relives it. Every night, hoping something will change, that this time it will be different.