(And there you remain, powerless to stop it.)

One moment, he was asleep. The next, he was not. Nick didn’t do anything so flashy as sit straight up in bed, disturbing Tallulah and making a tool of himself; he opened his eyes and stared, sightless, into the dark. None of the half-formed shapes he could see in the streetlight cast on the wall in an unfamiliar pattern gelled, none of it made sense. Only once his eyes had adjusted did he identify where he was: the odd angles of the shadows were from the bay window downstairs. The blocky shape a few feet from his face was his desk, the lamp cast down towards the wall, laptop screen dark in the shadows.

Faced with this familiar panorama, he sat up. Tallulah rolled onto her back with a quiet muh? of concern, one hand coming up to rub at her eyes. In other circumstances, he would have found it adorable; right now, he found himself too rattled to find it anything. It happened. That was as far as his nerves would let him take it. “Just me, love,” he said, and she made a sound that might have been more concern or might have been consent. He patted her hip to reassure her before shifting out of the bed and padding across the lofted bedroom area to lean slightly against the railing. Outside the bay window, not even a shadow moved. He stared anyway, hoping to find something. Anything.

He was being watched. If asked to explain, he wouldn’t be able to. But he was being watched, and he didn’t know who was doing the watching. Maybe--but it would be ridiculous. No one had told him what happened to Shay. He knew she was… gone... but that wasn’t the point. Even if she was alive, there was no way she could be in here. Watching him.

Nick turned to the spiral staircase and descended it, moving slowly to muffle his steps. He felt odd, off, like someone had switched his skin with someone else’s while he was asleep--and not only someone else’s skin, but someone smaller. He felt tight all over, tight and wrong, like if he reached up and touched his face, he’d find different shapes. Skin that didn’t fit the cartilage and muscle and bone beneath it. Skin that stretched until it split.

They taught about this sort of thing in medical school. Dissociation, they called it. It happened to people with brain damage.

He stopped in front of the door to the apartment. An expectation passed through him, a momentary thought that there were guests coming, and he should unlock the door, should open it and let them in. It passed through him and left him more rattled than before, and he thought: what was it that he’d been dreaming? He remembered very little of it. But he knew Shay must have been there, for her to weigh so heavily on his mind.

A thought popped into his brain, intrusive, unwanted: What have you done?

He didn’t remember, that was the problem. He leaned one hand against the door, as if that would keep out whatever waited outside the apartment, just there in the hallway, a trickle of black blood at the corner of her mouth, staining her Crystal uniform. In his dream, Shay had been twisted, too-tall, her eyes human in a face that was decidedly not. Here, in this, this delusion where she was outside, she looked as she ever had. He could see her clever, pointed face, the dark hair in curls, that mole at the crest of her right cheekbone, the mahogany-brown eyes that were a perfect match for his and for Raleigh’s. Those familiar eyes held accusations, though of what he couldn’t say.

And he thought: what have I done?

That was enough. He had to look. He couldn’t obsess about it all night, he had to work in the morning, and besides that he was twenty-five: old enough that he no longer needed to obsess over dreams. Nick took a deep breath and slid back the deadbolt, unhooked the chain and let it swing freely.

The hall was empty. Nick stepped into it, uncertainly, and looked left, right--and up the stairs. “No one there,” he said, and for good measure, he leaned back into his apartment and looked out the bay window. No one there.

For a brief moment, he felt reassured. If Shay were not standing there, waiting for him, perhaps the whole dream had been untrue. He could ignore that question. What have you done?

As the deadbolt slid home one more time, he had a single pressing image in his mind: Shay, gliding down the hallway to resume her watch. Her eyes bored holes in the door. “I don’t remember,” he told the shade on the other side of the door, the shade he could not see. He didn’t even remember what he didn’t remember. Couldn’t know what had gone missing in his head. That seemed backwards; like something that was meant to be kind, but instead turned cruel. “I don’t remember what happened to you, Shay, I’m sorry.” But the shade outside the door didn’t waver in its stare, and he said it louder: “I don’t remember, Shay, I don’t know!”

“Nick?” He twisted away from the door, guilt warring with that nameless apprehension. “Babe, it’s four in the morning, you have to be up in an hour.” Tallulah’s face peeked over the railing, hair tousled with sleep. “Come back to bed.”

He took a deep breath. Right. He had work. A day in the pharmacy with the intern, and clinic hours, and... On the ceiling, the sickly yellow glow of the streetlamps flickered as a shadow passed them. The motion drew his gaze, prickled the hair on the back of his neck. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking out towards the street. He still felt watched. Like he ought to run. What have you done? “I thought... It doesn’t matter.” He mounted the stairs slowly, one at a time, and curled himself back into the bed, Tallulah tucked close against his back and murmuring meaningless platitudes.

The watch on his bedside table ticked, like a fat wooden heart.