Nightmare
The ceiling of his prison was red. It was his own fault that he was here, tied to the bed as if he had gone crazy and violently suicidal.
Or maybe he had.
Blurs of faces asked him questions he couldn't answer. Was he talking to people? Or were they only bags of skin with mouths that moved and spoke only gibberish? He could never tell – they all looked alike; piles of rubbery skin with sweating pores and moving mouths.
His nightmare had red hair and a moving mouth. A nightmare because he came in the middle of the night when no one felt the need to watch him, when nightly room checks were forgotten and he was alone. But his nightmare had a face, unforgettable and striking – something about it said: I am real.
No one else believed him when he talked about his nightmare, not his friends, not the nurses, not even his therapist. They told him it was in his head; that he was only seeing the redheaded man, imagining his voice, and that he was delusional when he felt the warm caress of his hand.
Oh, but Alfred knew they were wrong – the bags of skin with wet spots and dry spots and moving mouths. They were all wrong because this red nightmare was very real.
Checks stopped around one or two a.m., when the night shift got tired of peeking in on sleeping bodies and they sat in the lounge with cups of coffee to watch the news and infomercials. The door never opened, but the nightmare came anyway.
He would appear by Alfred's bedside with a wicked grin of sharpened teeth and words that he barely heard. He would touch him and swear at him and promise him unspeakable things, and when Alfred woke up in the morning with bruises and cuts that bled, they tied him up and said he did it to himself.
That was a lie.
So maybe he didn't have bones in his body (how could he even check?), and maybe he saw too many questions in the tiles of the floors, and maybe he wasn't like everyone else or maybe he didn't really exist at all, but he knew for certain that this nightmare was real.
"He said he's coming again tonight," Alfred said one morning during breakfast. He had been untied for good behavior two nights in a row. His checks were reduced from an hour to every fifteen minutes. "I told him not to, but he's coming."
Breakfast was runny oatmeal from bulk packages with milk and bran-flakes if they craved something blander. Alfred would never complain about breakfast. Normally he was tied up and force fed bran-flakes and a dose of Thorazine. Being able to eat on his own was a treat and privilege he refused to squander.
Matthew was his old roommate – roommates before the nightmare started to come and before the cuts and binding and morning doses of Thorazine. To Alfred, everything about Matthew was yellow. He was yellow like the walls of a doctor's office – an off-white, beige sort of color that could never quite be white but no one ever questioned it until it was on a wedding dress. 'Champagne' is the exact color Alfred imagined Matthew to be.
He was champagne because he would stand in the corner and stare at everything and nothing, quiet and unobtrusive as his world exploded in his mind. That hand wasn't there, he only has two eyes, curtains don't move like that, why is the ceiling oozing?
"For the hundredth time, it's not real." Matthew stabbed at his oatmeal and stared at it. "I'm not going to see you at breakfast tomorrow."
"Why?"
Matthew gave Alfred an odd look. "You're going to be tied up again."
Alfred shook his head. "No way. I'm going to make sure he doesn't touch me. Sometimes he listens to me, you know? Most of the time he doesn't, but I'll try and talk him out of touching me."
"I'll let Sophie know."
Alfred grimaced.
Sophie was the head nurse. She was green and smelled of outdoors. Alfred didn't like to talk to her because she was the one that gave him the morning doses of Thorazine – the ones that made him tired but unable to sleep, that made him stare up at the red ceiling for hours thinking about the nightmare's hair and his words and what his touches had felt like against his shivering body. She was green because she wasn't soft and she was set in her ways; green because her moving mouth only made poison for his ears. She was green because everyone had respect for her.
"Don't."
Matthew would anyway.
"Checks," the nurses would say as they opened the door and peeked inside, taking account for Alfred's presence before slamming it shut. "Checks," they would say as the watched his hands, watched him sleep, watched him not once scratch or peel at his fleshy skin of pores above meat and possibly no bones.
"Checks," they said until around two in the morning when they got tired of looking at him doing nothing every fifteen minutes, when they thought the stillness beneath the blankets was sleep and not contemplation.
Red had been his favorite color before the hospital. Red was loud, it said look at me and held emotion both angry and attractive. Red was seductive, untouchable, and promising. Red was his nightmare.
His checks stopped at two forty-five. They thought he was sleeping, motionless under his starched white blankets, staring at the ceiling they told him was white.
"It's red," he said.
"What is?"
Alfred lifted his head from his pillow. He was tired but he couldn't sleep. There was too much to think about; what to tell the nightmare, what to tell the Gray Therapist, how to prove that things were real even when it was obvious that they weren't.
The nightmare stood next to his bed. The door never opened or shut, the lights never flicked on or off, but he was there. "What's red?" the nightmare asked again, "My hair? The ceiling? Your anger?"
"You are," he said and lay back down. "You shouldn't touch me tonight. They untied me just last night. I don't want to be tied back up."
"But I can loosen your restraints, you know that. I've done it for you before." He ran his hand over the inside of Alfred's wrist. "There is nothing wrong with me touching you. You like it. It soothes you."
Alfred watched as the nightmare's hands skimmed across his skin, changing its color from a muddled purple-brown to a rash of reds both hot and cold. "You make me red too."
The nightmare nodded, his hair falling about the horns on his head. Too many things about the nightmare made him different – made him real. His horns, the bat-like wings, the twisting tail, they told Alfred different and different meant real. "Red with anger," the nightmare cooed into his ear, "red with lust, and red with willful pride." The nightmare had green eyes.
"Red is love too."
"I… suppose it is." The nightmare's hands splayed across Alfred's chest. "It's not uncommon."
Alfred frowned as the nightmare started to touch him in earnest, peeling off his night clothes to touch at his color-muddled skin, making sure every inch changed to a blister red that made him sigh and moan softly. The nightmare had talons that cut into his red skin, which showed him that maybe he actually was real – more than a rubbery bag of skin with dry and wet spots. The nightmare was verification.
"Tell me that you want me to please you. Give into the lust."
A lifetime ago Alfred would have said no. Back when he was blue and young and not tied to a hospital bed more often than not. He swallowed and said, "Yes. Make me real."
He never told the Gray Therapist what else the nightmare did to him. It was his secret, his privilege. The nightmare would strip and touch himself with greasy fingers before straddling Alfred's hips and biting him with sharpened teeth. He would never admit that he liked it, that he begged for more pain and more sensations and validation. And when the nightmare licked his cock, rubbed it and played with it before rubbing the head against his puckered entrance in a sweet torture. Alfred would never admit to that because the only thing keeping him from becoming red was shame.
"Don't stop," he begged the nightmare as he rocked his hips, thrusting his swollen cock between the nightmare's ass cheeks. "I need more, you can't stop. Give me more."
He grinned maliciously. "I will, my pet, I will. First, say my name – make me real. Tell me my name."
The nightmare was real to Alfred. He had a color, difference, a function, and a name. Things should only be named when they had everything else. Alfred whimpered and clawed his arm. "Arthur," he gasped out and the nightmare sunk down onto his cock in reward.
"You're my prize, you are me and I am you," the nightmare would tell Alfred as he rode his cock. The starched sheets of the hospital bed tangled around his feet as he searched for purchase to lift against. "There is no escape; it is your fate – your purpose."
Unlike many times before, Alfred was not tied down. He touched and explored the nightmare's devilish features, feeling the leathery skin of his tail and wings, cutting his palm on the sharp tip of a horn. He could barely understand the words that came from the nightmare's moving mouth, but he knew that he liked it, that it made sense, that he wanted to hear it.
Alfred came hard into the nightmare's ass, his balls tight and pained from his unusual lack of orgasm lately. He gripped nightmare's thighs, desperate for more even though he knew it was over.
The nightmare came on his stomach and chest, grinning and flushed and pleased – a bright, luxurious red that made Alfred feel more wanton and less sexually sated. "Soon enough you'll come to me."
The next morning Alfred woke with the Green Nurse hovering over him with a cup of Thorazine in her hand. He was bruised, cut, bleeding, and there was dried cum splattered against his chest. He looked away from the cup to the ground and spotted a man's dress sock. It was real. He accepted the cup and his fate.
The Gray Therapist stared hard at him from across his polished desk. There was a computer, a manila folder with papers splayed around, and a triangular nametag that read: Dr. Beilschmidt. "You had a bad night last night," he told Alfred. "A relapse."
"I guess I have those a lot."
The therapist nodded. "More so recently. Tell me more about this nightmare that you keep having."
Alfred shook his head. "It's a man. A red man. He comes in when they get lazy during checks and he scratches me and bites me and tells me all sorts of things."
"I see… and what does he tell you?" There is the frantic scribble of pen on paper and Alfred's positive it says 'he's crazy'. "What does the nightmare tell you, Alfred?"
"That I'm red. That I can be red. He makes me red, just like him – says that red is for anger and pride…" He looked at his chest, recalling the warm semen that had been splattered against it just that morning. "And lust too."
"Is this nightmare sexual?"
He paused, picked at the skin around his fingernails and stopped when he noticed the Gray Therapist's color had darkened. "Yes."
"Do you enjoy it?"
"Yes."
The man sighed and set his pen down to rub at his featureless face. "Can you tell me why you become aroused? Or why this nightmare is arousing?"
"He is red and red means sex. He has sex with me." Alfred looked at his hands, curled his fingers into this palm and stretched them out again. "And I like it."
"I see. If the nightmare is red, what color am I?" he asked, trying to make something productive of their daily hour.
"Gray. You're gray like rocks and faith." He shrugged his bruised shoulders, the hickeys beneath his cotton tee were easily within reach of this own mouth.
The Gray Therapist made a note, tapped on his keyboard and then swiveled the monitor of his computer so Alfred could easily see the screen. "And what color is this man here?" he asked, pointing to an enlarged photo of a smiling mouth inside of a blob of skin on a face.
"I don't know. It's a picture."
"I see." He jotted down a few more notes and placed his hands on the desktop – the visual sign that he was done for today. "I would suggest that you think about why the nightmare makes you feel the way you do and try to prevent it. You have a new resident, so be sure to speak to them if your bruises and cuts cause you any pain. I'll see you tomorrow."
Alfred nodded and crawled off his seat. He would see Gray tomorrow and the day after and the day after – until either Gray retired or he died. Alfred would be here forever, he knew that well enough. He was getting better, though. He didn't scream any more, didn't throw things and bite. He knew how to act normally when other people were around, how to pretend and muddle his colors. He might get out one day, but it had already been two years.
He could, however, escape.
In the early morning when the checks had been forgotten at three fifteen, the nightmare came to him as his hands were tied to the bed posts.
"Those look tight, allow me to loosen them for you," he said, his fingers playing with the fabric of his binds.
Alfred shook his head. "Leave them. I don't want to do anything tonight. I have a question."
The nightmare stopped and looked at him curiously. "A question?" he repeated as if he didn't believe what he had just heard. He sat next to Alfred on the bed, stroking the curves of his face with a sharp smile. "I will happily answer your question."
"How do I become red?"
He stopped, his talon-like fingers resting on Alfred's lower lip. "Become red? Ah, like myself. You want to become what I am?"
Alfred nodded.
"I am not human, you know. But you're already very much like me. You have so much anger and lust and pride, you have committed so many sins and altered your realities. There is but one thing you would have to do: die. Come to Hell with me."
That was when Alfred started to scream. He couldn't abide by that, wouldn't, shouldn't. He wasn't allowed to even think of it – not again, not ever again. He shouted and thrashed against his bindings, startling the nightmare away into nothingness.
Nurses ran in and held his legs down, a cup was pressed to his lips and he gagged on the hot liquid of Thorazine, fighting as much as he could, despite the sudden limpness of his arms and legs as he was dragged to solitary and locked inside.
His prison was red, everywhere he looked was red. He couldn't escape – but he could.
They had untied him again, the fifteen minute checks became half hour checks. They almost trusted him – solitary helped him. He explained to the Gray Therapist that he shouted to make the nightmare go away, that he was trying to do what he was told and fight the nightmare. He refused to divulge what the nightmare had told him, but he assured him that he was making progress.
He saved up the aspirin he had been prescribed from the resident and contemplated them each night as his collection grew from thirteen pills to forty five and more. During the day he frequently felt horny and he would sit in the corner of his room to jack off, despite the checks, occasionally sucking on his shoulder to imitate what the nightmare had done to him.
Colors started to blend and he found it difficult to differentiate who he was talking to, but he pretended that there was nothing wrong. He was okay as long as he never used names.
Three months after the last visit from his nightmare Alfred stole the Champagne boy's belt. It had a buckle and was made of thick, slightly worn leather. It had taken Champagne a year and a half to earn it – it was his father's, who never visited anymore.
No one had ever visited Alfred. There was no one to miss him.
At night after the checks had been forgotten at one a.m., he would lay the belt beside the line of aspirin and contemplate the nightmare. The ceiling was still red and so were his palms. He thought about all the things the nightmare had told him, the way he was touched and how he was received.
The nightmare wanted him. This hospital didn't.
He put the belt and aspirin away, hiding them within the flat stuffing of his pillow. Now he had a plan.
It was easy to convince the Gray Therapist to give him a notebook and a pen under the claims that he couldn't talk about his feelings nearly as well as he could write them. He was given a journal assignment and dismissed.
He spent days in the lounge, his knees tucked up with the journal in his lap as he wrote about everything and anything that came to mind. Sometimes it was illegible scribbles that coincided with the indistinguishable noise that was in his head, and sometimes it felt like a diary where he could write about even the most trivial of things.
But eventually he came to a point where he had nothing left to say except for one thing.
That night checks were forgotten at three thirty and Alfred took out the aspirin and the belt and placed them on the floor. He had made a new hole in the belt with the spring of his pen and one by one he picked a pill, placed it on his tongue, and swallowed.
Fifty two pills he swallowed and scattered the rest. He took the belt and wrapped it around his neck, pulling and pulling until he could secure the buckle on the tiny, handmade notch. He couldn't breathe, his head was swimming, and so he pushed himself into the corner of the room, clawing at the walls as he waited for it to finally happen.
The nightmare came to him then and caressed his face. He swooped down and kissed Alfred's purpling lips, pulling all the red from within him through his mouth, until he was standing next to the nightmare watching himself die.
"Let's go home," the nightmare said.
He nodded.
Alfred slumped against the wall, the pen falling from his limp fingers.
At five fifteen in the morning they found his dead body next to his journal. The page it was opened to simply said:
I have become red.
Unimportant Notes: Originally written for the usxuk sweethearts week. Prompt: colors.