Chapter Text
"It feels good to be back, doesn't it?"
Head first, you tumbled into a matrix of corridors, white tiles bleeding into jarring rainbows dripping into white tiles. Falling and ever falling, there was no up, no down, no left nor right, every direction a kaleidoscope of copies of the same hellscape you'd escaped—so many years had passed, and yet…
"I'm… dreaming…" Your words drifted into the lucid horror with shocking clarity.
"Oh, yes, you are." That gritty voice rang within your head again, rebounding from ear to ear.
"Who are you?"
Arms and legs flailing, you tumbled onward, no trace of wind on your skin, no scent in the air. The matrix stretched on, a scaffolding of corridors folding into each other in the distance.
"You know me," the voice taunted with a haunting familiarity to its gravelly tone. "This is not your first dream of me, not your first nightmare."
Dizziness began to claim your eyes, limbs and body bound to the endless descent towards whatever scrambled back there; building blocks rising into three-dimensional space.
"While I was banished by her, you sat in hiding and watched."
"No-o…"
"I know you did. Who do you think spared you, hm?" The voice dripped down the column of your spine, leaving sickly frost in the marrow of your bones. "I wanted to leave with you, and make you my companion."
The tunnel collapsed and so did your vision, and when you cast your eyes back open there was ground beneath your feet and halogen lamps above, buzzing away with blinding glow. A bell struck within your head.
"I see your dreams, but I do wonder… did you think of me sometimes?"
Turning on your heel, you found the silhouette of Peter Ballard as you remembered him. An angel's countenance, framed by soft, blond curls, hands clasped behind his timid posture. The faintest smile touched the pink curve of his lips before he opened his mouth to speak with the dulcet voice you recalled so well.
"Wasn't I… a nice workplace romance?"
He had been so much more than that.
Peter—Henry—stepped closer, polished shoes clicking softly on the bleached tiles. His orderly ID card dangled mockingly at his belt.
"Yes?" He pried. "Is there something you'd like to say?"
"Please let me go."
"Go?" Henry's brows drew together in confusion, creating a divot between them. "Go where?"
"Go home."
"Ah." He softly shook his coiffed head. "I always hated when you went home at the end of the day. And I was stuck. Left behind and forgotten while you went about the wretched world."
Moving backwards, your shoulders collided with a door which promptly gave way, leaving you stunned at the revealed room's center.
"Do you recall this place?"
Naturally.
This had been Henry's for as long as you could recall, furnished with a simple bed, plain sheets, a desk, a chair, a shower cubicle. You knew each of these objects intimately, remembering the many ways your limbs had been folded across them; the wet glass against your cheek, the soft sheets under your knees, the whispered, breathless confessions against your naked chest while you combed your fingers through ruffled, blond curls.
Henry followed you into the room and the bell struck in the far distance, yet somewhere close.
A shadow fell upon his deep blue eyes and when he angled his head, a string of vertebrae cracked along his neck.
"I often find myself afflicted by a sort of… nostalgia." He took a step closer and a tiny muscle feathered at his jaw. "Don't you feel nostalgic too?"
When his hand rose slowly, you could do naught but watch—like back then, in the surveillance room, neck upon neck cracked by the very hands that had held you in the morning.
"We could do it like this?" A force pushed you to your knees, a ten ton weight on your legs that made them buckle. Trembling, you glanced up at Peter's scowling visage, a broken halo scattered around his hair. The horror in your eyes didn't please him.
"Or like this?" At the sprawl of his fingers, you found yourself tipped to your back with force, spine aching as your legs were snapped apart and your wrists restrained to each side of your head.
It never used to be like this—with fear and force—but maybe not because he hadn’t wanted to, but because he hadn't been able.
"No?" Henry tilted his head the other way, a deep furrow carved between his brows as your eyes filled up with unspilled tears.
His fingers clenched into a fist and your body rose up tall like a corpse resurrected, sliding to him on the tips of your scraping toes until you were nose to nose and the pristine row of buttons brushed against your chest.
The bell struck for the third time.
Unbidden, your lips parted in a little gasp, marveling at the level of detail bestowed by your imagination, every pore on his clean shaven face, the texture of his lips, the scrunch of his brows as he scanned your face for an answer denied to him.
"Why didn't you come save me?" While you hung suspended, one slender hand cradled your face, thumb tracing along your temple. "It's okay. You can tell me."
"I… I feel so guilty."
"Oh, I know…"
"If I had just hidden one or two of the kids in my room, they—" You gulped, struggling for breath against the lump that swelled there.
"All these years, and you're still lying to yourself?" Henry reacted neither in scorn nor anger, only disappointment framed the angles of his face. "Look deep inside…" His hand gently slid to the column of your throat.
"Hen-ry~"
"You try to tell yourself you could have prevented this. But you were the catalyst, my darling…"
Salty pearls finally squeezed free of your tear ducts as your hot and cold skeleton squirmed against the constricting force that had wound itself around your entire anatomy, choking you in shame.
"Don't cry," Henry murmured, projecting a soft confusion into his timid voice. "I'm only telling you what you already know. I wanted to set us free, that's why I did it. For you. For us."
For a heartbeat, his fingers flexed around your throat and with a flicker of the bulbs above, you thought you felt the ringing echo of cracking bones in your own spinal cord.
You closed your eyes but there was no mercy there. Henry's lips fell upon yours, both hands sliding to the back of your skull. A force compelled your palms to his waist and curled your fingers against his ribs in a mock replica of moments passed. His breath came in hot, little huffs, chasing after the answer still denied to him.
Why didn't you come save him?
Hadn't you been on his side?
Didn't he love you with every fiber of his strange heart?
Wasn't that enough to bind the only human he had ever cared about?
Nostalgia stung in your heart and mind and your fingers twitched on their own accord, moving against the nightmare that was this reincarnation of your dead lover, haunting you in dreams and nightmares, none of them as lucid as this one. He tasted of a world of sorrow, a yearning, vengeful soul buried in a land far away.
The touch of his lips made the world fall away, layer by layer, until nothing remained and you fell through the figments of the kaleidoscope, awakening in cold sweat and tangled sheets to the fourth strike of the bell and a pounding in your skull.
"I will… see you… very, very soon, my darling…"