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Summary: monachopsis = the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place
Words: 1,936
Warnings: N/A
Author’s Notes: so... I guess I’m back with an update after 5 years?
CHAPTER TWO - Part Two
Chapter One: Part One, Part Two, Part Three Chapter Two: Part One
It takes him several moments to recognize his surroundings and acknowledge that the nightmare is over. So he looks at her, really looks at her, for the first time since he walked into her apartment. In the dim, blue lighting coming through the window, her skin appears thin and breakable. Her shoulders are hunched forward, bent by exhaustion, covered by a white shirt loosely fitted around her small figure. Her eyes, although tired, still seem to cut through the darkness in the room - diagnosing him. She looks young in this moment, so young, so faultless. She isn’t corrupted by the touch and sight of blood - not really, not in the ways he is.
She’s looking at him with those worried eyes and it makes something snap in his chest. She doesn’t see him for what he has been all these years - the experiment, the asset, the assassin. She’s looking at him like he’s human, like he has a choice. When she touches him it doesn’t hurt. Perhaps a part of him is still human, if she is able to see him that way.
A quiet sob escapes his lips without his permission. She shifts closer to him and holds both of his hands, her thumbs gently rubbing slow circles around his knuckles. Stubbornly, only his right hand felt the warmth of her touch. His vision starts to blur from the water pooling in his eyes, his breathing more laboured.
“It’s okay. You’re okay. It’s just me,” she whispers as she tries to meet his gaze. One of her hands rises up to his face leisurely, methodically. She brushes her fingers against his cheek so lightly that he thinks he imagined it at first. As her eyes adjust to the darkness, the stains on his shirt and the beads of sweat on his temples become clear. “You’re drenched. Let me get you a towel.”
“You’re coming back, right?” he asks breathlessly, avoiding her eyes. He only pulls away when she assures him she isn’t leaving. The thought of losing this scares him. He wraps his arms around himself and puts his head between his knees to calm down. He doesn’t know how much time passes by - every second feels like eternity.
She returns quickly, only to find him barely holding it together. She tells him that she’s here, that he’s not alone, a few times so he can be sure he heard her right. She runs her fingers slowly through his damp hair and waits for him to look up. When he does, she tries to smile encouragingly but there are tears glistening on his face and it almost makes her cry as well.
“Alright, I’m sorry, but you might want to take that shirt off,” she gulps, feeling her cheeks burning. He makes no effort to resist - he listens automatically, an instant reaction, too quick. She can’t keep up the smile. She asks if it’s okay, waits for him to nod, and then wipes his forehead gently with the edge of the towel. He leans into her touch as if he’s following a compass. He bases himself off of her - she’s his pillar, his reference point. She’s real and she’s tangibly closer than the contents of his nightmares.
He holds his breath when she reaches his neck, his shoulders. It’s a lot for him to take in - she touches him like she would a fragile object, and she looks at him like she’s losing faith the longer she stays near him. Being near him seems to drain the life out of her. The towel is soft. Whereas the outside world seems to be giving him a break for now, his insides continue to burn.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbles against her hand, his hair sticking to his forehead. His heart sinks in his chest when she traces his cheek with her thumb again. He tries to suppress the sobs but some still escape his lips. “I’m sorry,” he whispers breathlessly. He can’t look at her right now.
“It’s okay,” she assures him quietly, her voice light and clear amidst the turmoil in his head. Her hand moves up and touches his hair. “It was just a nightmare. You have nothing to be sorry for.” She doesn’t know what the apology is truly about. She can’t imagine the masses of black-clothed, puffy-eyed, nameless people who gather around fresh graves, who deserve and who own that apology. He has everything to be sorry for.
He shakes his head and more boiling tears fall down from his eyes. His shoulders hunch forward and his glance lowers under the weight of his private shame.
“No…” he whimpers. “No, it wasn’t.” The nightmare is real. It’s more than just a bad dream, more than a concoction of his sick mind - it happened. Everything he saw, the screaming, the bodies, the red-stained cement, it exists and it is real and he did it.
She hesitates for a split second, but she catches her breath and continues running her fingers through his hair. He lets himself hold onto her touch for a moment, but he eventually pulls away. He doesn’t miss her wariness.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she sighs after she withdraws her hand. It’s a careful, tactical question. Her professional experience resurfaces like a wall of defence - that detachment, of which she used to be discreetly afraid, now becomes a hiding mechanism.
“No,” his voice is barely audible. “I can’t talk about it.” If he does, he’ll lose her. If he tells her, all of it becomes real in this corner of the world, her home, the warm place she shared with him for no ulterior motive. He can’t bring that kind of horror into this undisturbed place.
She sighs as she slowly reaches out to hold his hands again. He doesn’t have the strength to shift away from her - he needs her to root him into reality before the nightmare swallows him.
“It’s safe here. You’re safe,” she tells him as she goes back to tracing circles on his skin. “If you want to talk, you can, yeah?” But, if it comes down to it and she will need to tell somebody, get him proper help, can she go against his wishes? Is she prepared to deny him that privacy for the sake of his health?
He shakes his head again. More tears fall as though his own body is trying to drown him. I can’t talk about it. If I open my mouth, the horrors will never stop. But he can’t say that out loud.
“Tell me what you need,” she says, a tinge of despair in her voice. You cannot cry - be professional; if she wants to be of any use, she has to keep her shit together, at least until he calms down.
His head rises shyly, his eyes looking up to her from behind his tears as if to say help me, take it from me. He never wanted this. He just wants to rest, he just wants it to stop, all of it, everything. He just wants it all to be over.
“Please just stay with me,” is all he can manage to say, a frail and dying whisper against the deafening silence in the room. Another sob escapes his throat.
And so she does. She shifts so that she’s leaning against the pillows, sitting upright. She opens her arms, inviting him with an exhausted smile. She tilts her head slightly as she waits. He doesn’t bother glancing up to her anymore. He just leans into her, too sick and too tired to care what happens to him. He rests his head against her shoulder, making sure his left arm doesn’t touch her, melting beneath her hand as she fiddles with his hair.
She takes his right hand in her free one and drapes it over her abdomen - he doesn’t fight back. She rests her cheek against his head and he hides at the base of her neck again, comforted. The tightness in his chest deepens beneath the shy kisses she plants at the top of his head. The storm outside quiets down to a soft rumble. The world grows still again as his pulse gradually slows down. Her hair is soft against his forehead and it smells lightly like vanilla - it makes him think of a bakery and the laughter of a young boy from Brooklyn, with golden hair and eyes blue like ocean water.
“Sometimes, when I get bad nightmares, I get up and I write them down,” she begins softly, her voice cracking and slurring under exhaustion. “I keep a little notebook by my bed,” she laughs quietly, more for herself than for him. His eyes are open halfway as he listens to her patiently. “And then, in the morning, I read about what I dreamt and it feels surreal. Nightmares just have a way to force you to sit and watch and experience all of it…” she sighs and she kisses the top of his head again, causing a wave of ache to squeeze his heart. “But in the morning, when I read the things I wrote, it becomes easier to deal with them.”
He shifts his arm and wraps it lightly around her waist. He tries to lie to himself, to convince himself that he can feel that way too - that writing about his dreams and seeing the absurdity with rested eyes will make them easier to handle. He just wants to sleep peacefully again - just for a few minutes.
“When I have nightmares, they’re usually about what I see at work,” she continues, her voice growing softer, sweeter. There are tears stinging her eyes but she holds them back. “I dream about the things I see, the people I couldn’t save, the people whose hearts I have to break.”
Her nightmares are memories too. He longs to do something for her, but he doesn’t know how to fix things. Everything he touches dies.
“I tell myself that, if I see them in my dreams, I’m remembering them. And by remembering them, they don’t just become a patient, a number, or a church service… They were real and they lived, and I lived along with them.” Tears run shyly down her cheeks. The arm around her waist tightens around her, grounding her in this moment.
They were real and they lived, and he lived along with them. His hands claimed lives, but he lived, somewhere in the back of his head, and felt their pain and screamed until his throat was on fire. He lived, even if he was a prisoner in his own mind.
“And no matter how many times I feel like I deserve to die with them,” she adds, with a tremor in her voice. The pit in his stomach is so deep it’s hitting his spine. “I get out of bed in the morning because I am more than the people I couldn’t save.”
I am more than the people who died because of me. I am more than what they forced me to be. I am more than a victim and I am more than a weapon. I am more than the people I have killed and I am more than the people I have killed for.
His lips hover gently above her collarbone. He closes his eyes, a few shy tears still escaping, but his heart has quieted down now. He stops focusing on anything particular, listening only to her voice, her heartbeat, and the sound of the rain.
That was the first time he fell asleep without a nightmare.
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