Sleep was still a weird experience. I wasn’t plagued by the same nightmare over and over, although it did still pop up, alongside other similar visions. That meant that there were still nights like this one where images of my hurting Maria, and my own–my own dead body, kept me from getting a good night’s rest.
Nights where I spent way too much time sitting on the toilet and looking at everything and nothing on my phone. I let out a sigh and closed my phone. It was two forty five already, and I couldn’t afford staying up all night. Again. The written exams were coming up soon and I needed to be healthy and ready to study tomorrow.
But it seemed that the universe was not in my corner tonight, as I heard a thud and hushed voices coming from the living room. Someone was in my house. I took a deep, shuddering breath and removed my glove.
I looked at my bare hand. This was my house, I couldn’t destroy it. Which meant that I’d have to go straight for the intruders. The bathroom door led straight to the living room and then, depending on where the intruders were, the only thing between me and them would be a glass coffee table.
I turned the knob with my gloved hand and got out. But there was nobody there.
Before I could do anything else, I felt something grab my neck and throw me to the floor on my back. Whatever or whoever it was then grabbed my gloveless arm, twisting it slightly. They grabbed my neck as well, pressuring it just enough for it to be uncomfortable.
“I suggest you stop fighting. It won’t do you any good,” they said in a deep, mechanical sort of voice. They then let me go and a person was suddenly standing over me. A person dressed in a silver suit with a black trenchcoat and full face mask with pure white eyes and grey gloves and boots.
A person that, for all intents and purposes, looked like Crisis, a villain so infamous some thought he wasn’t even real.
A sensation that I hadn’t felt since we met that villain on the bus suddenly overwhelmed my entire body. I was afraid, but I also wanted to make the bastard suffer, wipe whatever smug, self-satisfied expression he had on his face.
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“Leave,” I said, my voice trembling. “Now.”
An ugly sound came from Crisis, one I could even hesitantly call laughter. “I’m not a pseudo-telekinetic underachiever. I’m not a failed wrestler. You can’t stop me.”
I leapt at him, punching him in the stomach with my gloved hand and grabbed onto his face with my free one, touching him with all but my pinky fingers. “Please, don’t make me do this,”
And Crisis kept on laughing.
“Stop,” I said, but it was no use.
He just kept on laughing.
And so I put down my last finger. Next thing I knew, I was staring at my own body, dead in the middle of some street. I was dressed in a dark blue suit with red rings throughout my arms and legs.
People were walking by, but they didn’t even give a second look. Only two did. A blond guy and a girl with black and blue hair looked at it, anger and disgust evident in their faces.
My breathing quickened and I wanted to do nothing but run, just run like there was no tomorrow, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t will my body to move. And then they turned to me, their faces stretching and morphing to look exactly like Iraklis and Birgit.
This is where you’ll end up.
“This is a dream,” I said quietly, over and over and over. The disgust and anger didn’t leave their faces, and I couldn’t imagine–I wouldn’t let myself imagine–a world where this was real. A world where I lost the only two people other than my parents that didn’t view me as a monster.
This is where you’ll end up.
And then I woke up.
I was still in my bathroom, sitting on the toilet with my phone in my hands. It was four thirty in the morning, which meant I had about two hours before my parents woke up, and five hours till my alarm clock woke me up.
I looked around the living room on the way out. There were no signs of struggle, which solidified the fact that it was a dream. One that felt even more real than the worst nightmares I’d ever had. One that I prayed to God I wouldn’t see again.
The next few weeks went on relatively smoothly. I met with Birgit pretty much daily, and even talked to Iraklis over a video call. He still wasn’t completely settled in, so it wasn’t as frequent as we’d like it to be, but it was better than nothing. Throw in a frantic amount of studying–I would never be convinced that I was ready for the exam–and you would have summed up my daily life.
The nightmare had also settled into somewhat of a rhythm of their own, appearing once or twice a week. The Crisis related one never reappeared, but flashes of my dead body, the incident with Maria, and myself dressed in red-caped costumes were always there.