** Trigger warning for deaths, rot, etc**

















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Nightmares:

He should have expected them, sleep is at best elusive, he lacks appetite for almost anything except a strange almost feverish want for some wild taste of life. Some confirmation that the world still turns, that it’s real and that he isn’t in some terrible dream. It seems that the dreams just refuse to end, stringing on behind the other and some of them are memories, replayed in horrible details that he can’t be sure he saw, or if his mind simply supplies them to fill in the gaps provided by horror and adrenaline… Shock….

Nothing quite seems as real as it did before the House. Nothing quite feels true. He pulls up the picture of ‘Himself’ on his phone, imports it to the computer so he can blow it up as big as possible before the quality goes to s**t.

A laugh bubbles up like bile in the back of his throat, a bitter taste of something like humor as he thinks absurdly of Television Dramas, things he abandons after at best a season when he grows irritated at stereotypes and television-science.
He stares at the heavy black collar, the necklace around the neck of a face that is, and is not his own and he wonders who the hell he was Mourning.

Who, in that life, had he gotten killed, hurt, or worse?

That’s the meaning of Jet, of Onyx, of black stones set and worn no matter how ornamental, how sentimental. Death, he, or she, in that life wore death around their throat, immortalized by a painter whose name means ‘Ghost’, or something like it.

He blinks, and behind his eyelids the moments play out again.

Blink, an arm reaches out from the mirror, and touches him.
He shudders and opens his eyes, wondering, though he knows it’s absurd if he can leave his eyes open for longer if he just keeps adding eye drops. They make some that are like tears, right? Wouldn’t that be fitting?
All the tears he had felt dried up, like he might never cry again, like that had been stolen from him.

He was so…damned tired. His eyes were burning and his shoulders felt heavy, but he knew if he tried to sleep the same thing as before would be waiting for him.

He tapped idly at the keys, but he didn’t expect results, after all he had no solid direction. You couldn’t just plug in. ‘P.O.C –date here- Ashdown’ and expect anything reasonable. He was desperate enough to try it with the safe search off, and wondered honestly why some of the results came up as even remotely reasonable.

He hoped others wouldn’t be incorporated into the nightmares he already had. Some things, he personally felt, should not go the places people put them in the name of the Internet.

He closed his eyes for a moment, Alg rotted in a heartbeat, his heart popped like some gruesome balloon. Black and gore that had become putrid. He thought he could still taste it.

He opened them again with a shudder, had he fallen asleep, If only for a moment?
Nausea rolled through him. Jer, sucked down into that black, a La Brea Tar pit of –rot. Shivering he pulled a blanket around his shoulders, and wished it had anything to do with the cold.