[P] YOU.

[Only]

 

“ there are bullet holes where my compassion used to be ”

Tonight Only dreams of Faida, the woman who haunts him more than Stephen does.  The woman who tears into his dreams like they are tissue paper and turns them into Nightmares. 


Faida, nightmare fuel.


She makes him whimper like a baby in the dark. 

He curls in on himself like one, hugs his knees and prays.


He prays for someone like Calliope, a valiant knight in the Rift, the destroyer of the sick.

But even she is not here.  

Without the Rift and all of its filthy souls lost within it, he has nothing.


Not even Stephen will show himself to Faida - Faida who chases him in his phantom worlds.
He dreams of forests thick with monsters - monsters that are hungry for flesh and bone and screams .. he leads the antagonist here hoping that Faida will meet her end.  He prays that the beasts that only he can conjure up in his dreams will cut her name from his earth.


But she persists.


Legs twitch, they twirl in the pacing of someone running from something terrifying.


In his dreams he runs and runs and runs but still, she gains.

Is this the end?


The monsters all turn to their storymaker - the stakes have changed.

What was once under his control is not anymore.

She has control.


Faida, Queen of the Monsters, she is coming to kill him.

For once, even Stephen is nervous about this killer.

This killer who wants to find him, who wants to taste him, who wants to make him her own ..


Her sickness, so alien to him and yet he has been made to feel it in ways that have haunted him.  


And still is, haunting him --


Just.


Like.


This.


Only groans against the oppressive night which wraps itself around him.  He lays in the grass just outside the city borders and sleeps under the stars, wide open for attack because he doesn’t care anymore.  He doesn’t care if he should live or die, his own purpose has been lost, only Stephen’s demands remain.  To find Winona.  What happens then?  What then?


What do we do?  Only asks.  He is face to face with Stephen.


We run like hell from here.  Stephen’s eyes are so cold that Only trembles.  Stephen’s voice is chilly too.


I’m tired of running Stephen.  Only says.  He is exhausted, somewhere out there in the beyond of his dreams Faida is coming for him.


They don’t have much time to be like this, face-to-face, soul against soul, yellow-to-green, Stephen and Only.  Stephen caresses the underneath of Only’s chin and pushes it up because he refuses to let Only look away from him - to lose valuable focus.  Only wants to kill him for touching him like that -- like he cares for him.  


What lies that is, what lies.


She isn’t the only thing that will kill you if you stop now. Stephen says.  His eyes level with Only's and an understanding is met in a matter of a moment.


Trapped.  Forever.


A vicious reminder over who is really in charge here.  Only falls back into the black and comes out on the other side where it is blue and full of ice, and water, and horrifying wonder. 


And still, Faida persists.


Everything is turning to ice and he feels frozen in place.  Only knows he’ll see her if he looks back.  Though he also knows he is sleeping.  The body stiffens and exhales hotly, clearly out of dreamy stress.  A golden foot paws through the grass, ears flicker nervously in a tangled nest of golden moonlight hair.  His heart tick-tick-ticks away frantically underneath the black viper scales and still, she has a hold on him.  He is fearless, as fearless as a mouse in the clutches of an owl. 


Someone else has him too, though.


“I didn’t know.”  The words come out, Only, still sleeping, murmurs them like he is explaining tragedy to his mother.  “I didn’t know he would come for you. Forgive me.  Please. Please.”  It is not Faida anymore, it is the medicine man and Only is the cowboy who shot him without warning.  Sold an innocent man out.  Trapped a sacred soul in a jar and lost it out at sea.  He haunts Only too, enough to make him feel real pain when the spear in his dream pierces his shoulder.


“Aah!”   A startled, wounded cry.


Only shoots up and looks around, disoriented, weary, wary, weighted with a guilt that has him seeing demons in his dreams.  The medicine man remains in his vision for a minute longer than what is welcomed and Only is convinced he is seeing ghosts.  For a moment he thinks he is really bleeding too before he looks at his shoulder and realizes nothing has happened.  Quickly, he gazes back to look at the man but he is gone - gone as if he never existed.


He didn’t.  This was only a dream.

But Faida, Faida was never a dream.  

His neck tingles with a strange memory of her lips on his skin, her teeth in his blood, her infection in his bones.  To this day he wonders if it will ever consume him the way it consumed her.  He wonders if his madness is because of Faida.


Then remembers that it was his madness that brought him to her before all of that.


His bad dreams have stirred someone.  A vagabond.  A resident.  An enemy.  He doesn’t know and quite frankly does not care.  The black gathers his wits and shushes the wild mind and the raging heart with a calm disposition although his ears twitch every which way, afraid that what he hears is Fai.  Deep down his animal knows that that is impossible, but the spirit knows no boundaries and has danced with the devil too many times to know that the dead wander long after the body has passed.  Fai may be dead, but her spirit persists.


It lives on in Only’s paranoia-fueled sleep, no where else, for it has plenty of food to feed off of.


The stranger is coming through from the other side, from within the city, and Only wonders if this will be it -- where he will be thrown from the city for never having contributed anything to the places he has wasted away in for so long here in Novus.  He comes back because the Rift is cold, cruel, and always waiting to feed off of his soul.  He comes back because here, in Novus, he has a chance to die and actually mean it.


“Hello.”  He tries gentility on but finds it to be too tight a fit - it sounds uncomfortable still.

“Who’s there?”  Less snug, too drapey.  Only switches quickly, eyes narrowing.  If Winona were here…

Well, she isn’t - is she?  That’s why we are here again.


No response.  Dead air. 

Dead air.

Static silence.

The stranger has been realized.


“You are impossible to get rid of, you know.”  Someone else says, less awkward, more forward.  Ears stretching forward to tune into Florentine’s soft, quiet feet.  Stephen recognizes that face.


And by the look of things, Florentine recognizes his as well.


Only, on the other hand, is panicking from the otherside of the trapdoor Stephen caught him with.

O N L Y
and there is violence in my heart

 

@Florentine  ...yeah