By Kay
Disclaimer: I don't own. Pity, really.
I take up the cry, too, to "Save the Fandom!" (cheers) That's right, everyone, keep up with the fanfic! EW will always live on! Huzzah! Huzzah!
Thanks to RagnarokSkurai, who keeps writing fun stuff and checking the EW line. ;) I demand more Christopher Mpreg! (cackles)
April closes her eyes and hits the pillow. Sleeps.
She dreams that night for the first time when slumbering in Everworld, and perhaps it's no surprise that she dreams of home. Of family. The faint scent of burning leaves and barbeque in autumn, rich and crisp, curls around her with a blanket made of tenuous memories. She dreams about the rough wooden planks of her backyard porch, standing barefoot by the door and gazing on her parents—they are laughing, soundlessly, setting up frilly streamers and pink balloons. Her mother is younger—free—and she smiles at April's father with the tenderness she once radiated. In the glow of the evening, they are beautiful together. Reunited. Happy.
These are the decorations of her eighth birthday party.
She remembers, in a way that requires no thought, the sugar-spun taste of the frosting on the cake, and the tacky number eight candle that kept leaning over sideways. Her tongue tingles with it. She stands there on the porch in her Everworld night clothes, barefoot, eyes sliding shut against the sight of her freely joyful parents, this taste of home lingering on her lips like a brand.
She opens her eyes not a moment later, of course. Sits in the plastic red chair that she claimed as her own as a child, so small yet still encompassing all that she is, and smiles softly at her mother and father as they bustle around and chatter at each other, ready for their baby's big day.
But she cannot hear them, and when she wakes the air is as stale as the past.
Christopher sleeps fitfully tonight. He closes his eyes, resting his hands under his head to cradle it, elbows jutting out in long diagonals from his mussed blonde strands. The room is so silent that he can hear the uncomfortable hitch to his breath whenever he turns on his side, restlessly moving after no more than five minutes.
The first dream hits him like a shattered CD, skipping around its tracks in no definable pattern.
He's crouched in his driveway, the pavement still searing hot under his feet in the midday sun. His mother's ugly van is gone, his father's vehicle missing from its spot marked by the slick sheen of oil it leaves behind. The house is quiet, empty and hollowed out, and the mailbox is wide open—there is no name on it any longer, but the Spiderman stickers he once stuck to its flap as a child are still there, worn at the edges and faded.
In this dream, there are only two sounds. One is the steady rush of Mary Tyler Moore Show, the soft murmurs of bantering in his ears, and although he can't see it, it's there; he's seen this episode so many times that his hands can mimic every gesture. There are laughter tracks from Everyone Loves Raymond, the theme song of Friends and the sounds of trees clapping to it, and the sound byte of Samantha wiggling her nose on Bewitched. Classics, all of them. Invisible to his eyes—all he sees is the house, all he can focus on is the heated grit of the driveway, the rusted basketball hoop hanging on the garage door—but he can still hear them, a constant buzz in his ears. A static. A fuzzing, a meld of voices that he can only catch once he learns to listen for individual people. Everything he's seen, everything he's watched. Static.
The house is dark.
The second sound he hears is the squeak of a bicycle tire.
He wakes up. Gazes around, disoriented, and flops back into the middle of the bed. Sleeps so quickly that he hits the dream akin to the way his bare stomach meets the pool water when belly flopping. It slaps.
Mark is riding a bicycle in circles around Christopher. His baseball cap is backwards, his eyes far away, and his shoelaces whip freely at the ground on every push. He keeps pedaling around and around, the back tire squeaking, sitting on a cracked white seat with a 'K' slashed in the center.
Christopher can't speak to him. Can't move. Just crouches there, watching, listening to the television world humming around him and the strangely sharp screech of that tire.
It is hot. He wakes up.
Mark is standing in front of him, staring, and the bicycle is crashed against the mailbox pole in the background. His little brother's face is blank. Deadened. Lifeless. Accusing.
They watch each other the rest of the night, and the next morning leaves Christopher drunk by seven A.M.
David has been dreaming for a while now.
He's grown used to closing his eyes to find himself a mere apparition in the real world—the gradual disappearance of his body, though he knows instinctively should bother him, is nothing more than exactly what he wants. He slowly vanishes from the world of school and his mother, fades into the cheap yellow wallpaper of his house, and feels nothing but a delayed sense of anxious appraisal at what will happen next.
He glides through home in most of his half-dreams, though he doesn't know why. Watches his mom bring home other men. Sits on the corner of the sidewalk of the block, staying hours to gaze at the people rushing by him in their boring, mediocre lives.
He knows that sooner or later, he will be completely gone. Sometimes he feels a rush of utter triumph and excitement at that thought, but strangely more often than not, it makes him want to go watch quietly as his mother does his laundry.
She never did his laundry before. Not until the past few days, when she began picking up his dirty clothes in his room one by one with shaking hands. She'd never done that before.
Tonight he dreams of this. Of laundry.
His mother is wearing a white sweater that dips low on one shoulder—she can pull off what most mothers can't, that blend of youth and age. She'd been young when she had him; just a girl almost. The gold is still vibrant in her hair, but there are purple bruises and bags under her pretty brown eyes now, especially evident in the stark white room they're together in; it clashes.
She is loading the washing machine, and he sits on the dryer. It used to be warm under him, once, but he can feel nothing in this world anymore. He cannot hear the words she mutters as she loads, whether they are spoken for the child she forgot, admonishment for the teenager she lost, or whispers to the man he'd become. He cannot smell the soap, cloying, in the air any longer. He can do nothing but wait to wake.
It is probably a good thing, he thinks.
His mother folds his Radiohead t-shirt and slips it in. She takes her time now, always. Lingers. No men come for her tonight.
Tonight, she washes away blood.
He knows something is wrong—she is still acting normally, going through the same motions as always, but the rags she puts in the washer are his battle clothes from another realm.
In go his rank, motley dishrags—the torn, ragged jeans he's patched a thousand times, stained from grass and mud, soiled copper by blood. The fur he received the first day, saturated with sweat and the clotting crimson of the Aztecs and Vikings, matted and useless. His tunic, his shirts, his coatings from the past—ripe with Hetwen guts and holes from the acid, lovingly fingered by his young mother in the laundry room, placed in the washer carefully. Evidence of thousands of deaths. So many battles. Dirt, water and blood, and the stench of fear and doubt clinging to the fabric, ready to be washed away.
She shuts the lid. Presses a button. David knows it is rumbling, but he cannot hear it or feel it next to his thigh. He only hears the screech of aliens in another land, a strange place in the corner of his head, sneaking up on him once again. He feels the keen edge of danger on his heels, but he stays, lingers, sitting with his mother and the white laundry room.
Strangely enough, he only realizes it is a dream when she turns to smile at him.
Jalil closes his eyes and dreams of an airport.
It is unnaturally barren; there are no people at all, no waiting passengers or employees, no planes out on the empty runway through the windows of the terminal. He is sitting in an awkward, blue-leather waiting seat, his skinny limbs sprawled on either side of him like gangly toys. He is alone. A battered black suitcase lays by his side, the handle broken, and a ticket to Indiana is clutched in his fingers—he went there when he was twelve for an academic challenge, he remembers vaguely. He is alone. The terminal clock reads 86:54 C.W. in bold red letters, endlessly blinking, never changing its numbers. It is dark outside, not a pitch black but the gentle envelope of shadow that falls upon the earliest point of morning, allowing only a slice of glimmering light to tease the horizon.
He is alone.
If asked, Jalil could not tell you the name of the airport—he does not remember these worn cerulean seats, the smudged glass panes of the windows, or the brown carpet that bristles under his bare feet. He does not know why he is here; there is no plane coming, no one to welcome him coming down the aisle, and he is still holding onto the slip of paper in his hand that he knows should be buried in a tin box under his bed at home, stashed away with other scraps or mementos of the past.
The ticket to Indiana has his seat number as, 'it's okay, please don't worry, I love you all.'
He knows this because he's written these words before, they're ingrained into his head so harshly that they press through his brain. They are scrawled on the back of his hand, the blue ink of a pen smearing slightly over his dark complexion. They're on a note pad far, far away.
The world is silent. He wonders if it's always been that way. If he's always been waiting.
The cuff of his denim jacket itches a little, but he can't bring himself to push it back from his wrist. Actually, he's not certain he can force himself to move at all, not in this unnatural stillness, this perpetual hold of his breath, caught in his lungs and frozen there. He is alone.
No voice speaks to him in his head. He is alone.
In this moment, going nowhere, with the long stretch of hallway empty before him, Jalil watches the sun rise outside until the entire room is basking in warmth, until the ticket falls to the floor and lies there.
And he sleeps.
The End