A/N: I'm not entirely thrilled with this, but the idea keeps on getting tangled and unfortunately I lost the original copy, and we all knows how rewrites with the original copy missing turn out. :(

Anyhow, this is written for the Daily Prompts Challenge on the Digimon Fanfiction Challenges Forum (link in profile). This is for Monday's prompt for the week: write a fic using the prompt "sleep".

dreams and darkness, dreams and death

Dreams are things the living took with them into death, and the longer that death lasted, the stronger and more frequent those dreams. For those who'd, beyond the natural night period in which our bodies slipped just under the fringe, experienced trauma defined as "near-death" experiences (an unfortunate term, really, as sleep was closer in many a case) in the medical field, have fiercer dreams than those with more peaceful lives. For Kouichi, who had not one but two very prominent moments of death – the time he had fallen down the stairs, and when Lucemon had scanned him in the Dark Area – his sleep hold very little respite.

Though, because so much of that time was wrapped in the blanket of darkness, his dreams are embraced by it as well, clouted in a veil of shadow that beckoned him, blind, into its midst. And he roams blind, for he has no other choice while locked in those dreams; he struggles when their chains twist around his wrists and ankles and neck – and awake, sometimes, gasping for breath with bedsheets tangled too tightly about his frame.

In his dreams, it is the darkness that seizes him in a choke hold he cannot break, holding him as the inevitable bit down its jaws. And he can feel those marks on him in his waking hours as well: the stiffness of his neck, the scratches and pains that sting in the open air, and the chill that never seems to leave his soul…

He doesn't dream about blood, or his data exploding into millions of fragments, like his brother sometimes does. But Kouji's dreams are few and far between when compared to his brother, and just as quickly forgotten by the both of them. Not that Kouichi doesn't try to forget his as well, but the consistency bleeds into his skin and eyes, and the expression "death warmed over" becomes a less ridiculous notion as time goes on.

Though it's not something that grows progressively worse, and the experiences fade a little as he ages and goes on in the human world. The Digital World drifts away bit by bit – and despite all it's given them, it's for the best because the dreams that came with it can fade as well. And when one starts to forget, they forget to dream as well – and Kouji quickly forgot the blood on Duskmon's sword, because there had been no blood.

Kouichi cannot so easily forget his death, because he had died. The scars were still etched into him: the small burns from where the defibrillator had shocked him twice to restart his heart; the scar where he'd split his head falling down the stairs. And he can't help but think about it so often, with the darkness choking them into his memories as he wakes. It is a more vicious cycle than most, and won't easily break. But he is alive and he has grown and the light and darkness – his darkness, not that half-darkness so reminiscent of Lucemon's taint – brush the clogging coal off that other sort. So when he's more grown up he's not a vampire who burns under the light but a boy who's seen too much too early and still has bad dreams that wake him up at night.

But he's still alive, and he still has light in his eyes and colour in his face, so he must be taking some life from the waking world with him into the realms of death.