Word Count: 580

The Negaverse Lieutenant haunts your dreams, his face added to a million others to rouse you from your sleep at night.

You still dream of the destruction—a city aflame with darkness, your friends frozen as if turned to stone, their faces caught in tortured expressions. You dream of a broken pen. You clutch the pieces of it in your hands and scream an angered cry as you face the darkness, powerless and alone.

You dream of a future you refuse to claim as your own, and the faces of the injured and the dead. You dream of a forest in flames, your cousin's face, and a Captain turned General King with his hand in Valhalla's chest. You see Valhalla's starseed for only moments before it is crushed before your very eyes. You know that there will be no happiness for you ever again, just pain, and misery, and death.

You go to your death in a blinding flash of light. The shattered pieces of your own starseed float away like dust on the wind.

You dream of Laurelite and a second faceless General-Queen. You dream if imprisonment, locked in a cage with no means of escape, with nothing to do but sit and wait and hope and pray that a rescue will come. In your dreams, it never does. The screams of the tortured become your own. You scream, and you cry, and you beg, but it makes no difference. It never makes a difference; it only makes the torture worse.

You dream of the beatings. Valhalla strains against the chains, but it is no use. You hang there in your own chains, bloody, broken, and defeated, before you are taken away and your dreams shift. You dream about the branding, about the scalding tea. You hear the clink-clink-clink of a cane against the bars of your cage, and Valhalla's wings thrown carelessly to the floor.

You dream of a faceless and nameless Senshi. You never did learn their identity, but they are a part of you now. You feel the starseed in your gut as if it is still there, not broken and dissolved as was surely the case. The Senshi stares at you accusingly. Because of you, there is one less to be reborn.

Now you dream of a Negaverse Lieutenant, young like Peter, with his entire life ahead of him, except that he made bad choices around the wrong people. You see him holding Olivia's starseed—not only is her life in his hands, but the lives of your unborn children. You attack with a vicious hatred you do not often allow yourself to feel, and in him you release all of your frustrations, all of your fears, and all of your sorrows.

When you are done his head is no more than a bloody mess. When you back away and his body rises, his neck is bent at an inhuman angle.

Snap!

You hear it in your dreams—the very moment his life was ended.

You awake gasping for breath, searching for a light, your movements so rushed and erratic you knock the lamp off of the bedside table.

Chris is there in an instant—to hold you, to comfort you, to offer you a kiss of reassurance, but you know it will never be enough to hold the dreams at bay. You see them in your waking hours, all those faces, all those lives brought to a premature end.

And you think, what right have you to live?