It was freezing cold. Lochlan's body was stricken with incessant tremors that didn't show any sign of relenting - though he just started to feel them it was as if he'd been plagued for hours. If anything, they only became more racking, and served to worsen his clenched stomach that was rolling. Waves of nausea lapped at the back of his throat, burning, leaving a foul metallic coating on his tongue. It was like he could taste what he smelled and the rancid smell was horrific but oh he did not want to open his eyes and see the cause of the pungent odor. Loch kept them squeezed shut, bare knee's scratching painfully on... cement? And why couldn't he move his arms! Left with little else to do but look and assess, those lids of his finally cracked open to take in the sight of none other than himself. Wasn't no reflection in a mirror, he literally sat adjacent of his former self strung up by bound wrist and the air in his lungs was knocked out by the metaphysical impact of the visual, "No no no no no wake the fuck up." He mumbled through tight teeth, jaw pulsing, not demanding his bleeding counterpart to lift it's head but willing he the dreamer to get the fuck outta there. Lucid dreaming? Loch lunged to stand but the only thing he managed to do was rattle rusty chains - that's why he couldn't move his arms; like his mirage across from him, he was bound the exact same way. No amount of pulling or prying was fruitful and his bare legs were locked in place. He looked down to see if they were anchored too but came to find only the mesh shorts he went to bed in. Seems his sub-conscience had a depraved sense of humor. If he wouldn't confront the trauma willingly, it would do it for him. Make him a hostage inside of his own goddamned traitorous mind. Movement caught his peripheral. Lochlan snapped his head back up and looked over in the corner where two men were screaming in each others faces. They were blurred out though, none of the features clear enough to make out so much as a wrinkle or whisker either one and he was deaf to any noise that didn't come from his own self; breathing, heart beat, and a dull buzz in both ears. Only reason he knew they were yelling was how the color of their mouths darkened when they went wide, their rigid frames bulking towards one another, fingers stabbing in this direction and that. It all suddenly desisted though when the one in the suit reached behind him to retrieve a snub revolver and pressed it none too gently in to the others forehead. Loch did hear the sound of the hammer being pulled back, but it was louder than it should have been - dramatic, echoing off the walls and right in to his canal so sharply that it made him both flinch and wince. He looked away. Didn't wanna watch what happened. Didn't wanna see if that guy pulled the trigger. Lochlan didn't want to remain in that dream! His rapid heart made his chest hurt. His bone dry mouth made his throat hurt. Breathing was difficult and he gasped for air he couldn't seem to replenish his lungs enough with. Loch searched for anger to grab a hold of. If he could just get mad enough, he could snap those goddamn chains regardless if this wasn't the laws of realism! That's why he looked at who was his alternate self. The weak and pathetic son of a bitch just hanging there bleeding all over the place, not fighting! If he could focus on himself then, who let everyone down and royally fucked up everything, oho he would definitely find that rage. His throat worked to swallow the bile he could feel rising in his esophagus while the rest of him worked to find the courage to look up again when he heard his own voice; ‘be front and center at my fuckin funeral, cryin your goddamn eyes out’. Lochlan seethed and flexed his fingers around the metal, pulling even when his shoulders threatened to sever from muscle, a flicker of the sweet madness warming his frigid body for a fleeting moment until he saw her. Smelled her. Heard her - ‘I was’. That's when Loch faltered in his fight, hearing her whimpered declare that she had been at his funeral. But she wasn't looking at either of him. Alone in the opposite corner, staring at something he couldn't see. ‘I can't do this without you’. His face pinched in perplexity - she knew he wasn't dead! ‘Please come back’. He was trying! "Cush--" He rasped for her attention, shaking those chains, "Look at me, Cush!" Lochlan begged when he watched her sink down to both knee's, back still to him, and he leaned forward in a pitiful attempt to be closer, "Wake me up..." Because he sure as hell couldn't wake himself up, didn't know how to try! "What was 'at, boyo?" He jerked his face in the direction of that ominous voice that made him even colder than he already was in spite of the fact he could feel sweat sting his eyes. Lochlan watched the sharp dressed man casually stroll towards his other self who had finally shut up with the death-wish instructions to his wife. Panic. That's what he felt grip him by the fucking neck when he saw that guy moving, swinging a razor strap slowly back and forth. He didn't know why it scared him, since when did he get legitimately scared? But it did. The kind of fear that had talons and dug them in so deep you were crippled by it. The kind of fear stemmed from a real place, a real possibility, that he was never going to wake up in his bed again, see his boys again, his Cush, that it would all be gone if he didn't get free. At least he managed to force himself to look away, right at her, who still wasn't looking back at him, "Wa-wake me up, Cush!" Because what if she didn't? Logic was gone and Lochlan was terrified he would never. The closer Sloan got to his target the more frantic he became, "Baby--" His voice quaked, wrists on fire from where they twisted in the shackles all of their own volition, "Please..." Couldn't swallow the golf ball knot stuck in his throat, but oddly enough it subsided whenever it turned to liquid behind his eyes and drained out the corner of them. "CUSH--" "Do ya worst..." •• Lochlan shot up like a bullet, coughing for a breath that his lungs were begging for him to take. Quilt had been kicked off his legs, the cold sweat irritating since he stuck to the fitted sheet because of it. He furiously wiped at his face and eyes, not just coughing but gasping a suppressed sob. Crying? The aftershocks from the fucking nightmare was still a definite monkey on his back that he was having a hell of a time shaking, had to look around to make absolutely sure he was awake but that didn't help at all, was too dark to see anything, so he sucked in through his nose to smell where he was at. The homeliness, the lingering scent of their bodies, her lotions -- it was all there but unfortunately did nothing to quell the witless fear that had him shaking still. People use the phrase like my life depended on it all the time. So overused was it, that no longer could you feel the affect it's meant to have when you hear it. But, when Loch felt his Cush? He never missed a beat, and he kissed her. Like his very life depended on it. Nobody would be able to refute that it did if they were privliged enough to witness. His lips and mouth used her own as if they were the resource, the only one, to provide him with the necessary elements of living; oxygen, hydration - and his supplicating tongue sought her healing one. Vehemently beckoning her to wash off the timorous feeling the dream left him wrecked with in his foggy waking. Didn't matter if he fucked her for all she was worth hours ago. It didn't matter if he knew she'd be bruised come morning with the proof he'd been on her. And it didn't matter she couldn't walk with ease to the shower when it was all said and done. Lochlan's hands still went on the roam over her body, but unlike their salacious wander before he fell in to that God forsaken slumber, this time they were just... importune. For her to make him feel okay. For her to erase that wretched shit from his head and calm his crawling skin while fingers and palms skimmed her supple curves from neck to inner thighs. Like she herself was a sanctuary he couldn't get in fast enough.
