AN: I wrote this fic on a whim last night (between midnight and 2:30 AM), while going through a little pile of prompt stuff I had lying around (I made it back at uni). My self-created "prompt" was to write a Godspell fic about nightmares using the words "across," "father," "nightmares," "my," "follow," "shadow," "woman," and "rueful." I can tell you now that the most difficult one to work in there was "my," and I think I forgot about "rueful," period. I don't know why; it's a good word, and one I somehow manage to use entirely too often. Anyway, this is probably crack, but I enjoyed getting into Lamar's head again. I missed the fellow. XD
The bit in the dream about strings was based on something that happened while I was writing; over on the highway behind the woods behind my house, I heard this noise like high-pitched string instruments. I thought it was a siren of some sort (it was subject to the Doppler effect), but it was honestly freaky as all get out.
Disclaimer: Godspell belongs to Tebelak and Schwartz. Only the descriptions of the characters belong to me, and I apologize for the lack of subtlety in their placement (I did NOT use the descriptions matching our production). I also stole a line from Mal Peet's novel Exposure, so if any of my readers (assuming there'll be even one) catches it, kudos and virtual cookies to you.
The voice, humming deep and low through air thick with smoke: more vibration than sound, the stuttering thrum of blood trudging against weary, deadened veins. Blood choking the light and turning it red, crimson red, the color of fear and rage and pain, the color of the damned. Shapes like faces half-remembered and soon-forgotten, forming and shattering to the beat of the earth's heart marking time, rising from ash and falling away to dust in concert. Strings of sirens piercing the vale of shadow, C-sharp and B-natural descending down to pitches unguessable, an uneasy decrescendo into silence.
A woman: her hair long, dark, tangled, her fingers slick with pungent oil, her face powdered and rouged into blankness, a mad clown's facsimile of beauty. A man: head lolling at an unnatural angle, a thick rope knotted around a bruised throat shredded red and raw. One strong, scarred hand clutching a robe red as the hellish light to a heaving chest. Another limp upon silver-bright coins dripping blood like poisoned wine.
A figure in white: arms spread wide, a heavy cross looming tall and forbidding behind the blinding white of its robes. Nails pounded through its- HIS hands and feet, yet HE neither bled, nor moved, nor even wept. Angels whispered through the holes torn carelessly in moon-pure flesh, a heavenly chorus singing every note and song ever and never conceived by man- but the wretched humming drowned them out, a tidal wave of ill fortune overtaking the gentle sun's glint upon a storm-plagued sea by force.
The humming grew louder, ever louder, as the lilting strains of the angels gave way to harsh cries, torn from a crushed and guilt-stopped throat- and the man on the cross began to writhe, begging in a familiar voice distorted by agony beyond human understanding, for someone, anyone, to see, to stay awake, to pray, to believe. Begging without a cause. Knowing none would ever think to answer pleas from one long dead.
XXX
Truth be told, it was a disappointingly anticlimactic awakening: nothing like the movies. He didn't come to with a gasp or a shout or anything of the sort, didn't sit bolt upright with heaving breaths sticking and dying in his chest, sweat-soaked sheets tangled around his legs. His eyes simply opened, the darkness of sleep fighting to remain even as the wan moonlight drove icy daggers into his not-quite-functional vision. For a moment his mind was still, empty: unprepared for the abrupt re-entrance into consciousness, the why of it all vanished from his memory like a shadow behind a newly opened door. Which was less disappointing than it was disturbing; he didn't know much and never had, but he was fairly certain that memory wasn't supposed to work like that. Or...not work. In some distant part of himself determined (probably to its detriment) to catalogue every mundane occurrence in his life heedless of reason or place, Lamar counted thirty-three seconds before the train of his thoughts found their tracks once more, before he realized that a dream, and not some sound, had woken him.
Most dreams, though, didn't leave ghosts in his mind that whispered of blood and fear in a demon's voice. Only nightmares writhed like dying things in his gut, bathed in the poisonous residue of images washed away upon waking, dwelling unseen within the sea of the subconscious until the next night's high tide. Even after so many years, the feeling hadn't lost its familiarity. Suddenly he was a small child again, plagued by a Saturday afternoon's hell every time he closed his eyes. The sickening crunch of metal. The shrill whine of car horns. Sirens. Screams. The seat belt cutting whip-lines into his arm and cheek, an air bag smothering him, the deadly blanket press of plastic fumes turning his world to ash. The stench of burning flesh and gasoline tearing his nose and eyes to shreds. And the blood, of course. Always blood.
There had been blood tonight. But tonight his father wasn't here to cup his tears in calloused palms and tell him beautiful stories (not lies, never lies) of Mama up in Heaven singing with the angels. He was alone, touched only by the voices, the faces, the fire- and it was an unsettling thing, extremely unsettling, to dream of people you'd never met. ...Assuming that he had, in fact, never met them, which...didn't seem right, somehow. Some intuition, some dream-sense, was insisting that he had known, at least one of them, but their voices and words were gone now, off to join the ranks of countless others he had let slip like water through the palms of his memory. Of course he'd forget what was most important. He always did, didn't he? As it was with the Master's stories, so it followed with his own dreams. His own dreams- how much of a royal idiot was he, to forget his own bloody dreams?
XXX
"Alright?" The voice cut through his desperate self-beratement like a knife, its blade rough and worn from either mistreatment or untimely awakening, both of which were (entirely) plausible. Lamar lifted his head almost guiltily, nervous eyes roaming the small lot to find out who'd spoken, to find out if they were angry with him...for...whatever reason. No reason; they wouldn't have asked the question if there had been reason. He thought. Hoped.
Herb had sprawled across the makeshift table with Jeffrey and Robin curled up on either side of him. He'd trapped Jeffrey with an arm, Robin with a leg; all three were snoring lightly in unison. Gilmer and Peggy embraced each other in sleep, sitting up with their heads bowed close together, propped against the table leg. Joanne lay by their feet, her mouth pursed in a pretty "o" as she whispered words no more substantial than fairies' breaths in the close dark. Sonia had crawled under the table, one leg out ramrod straight, the other bent in the air, high-top-clad foot swinging back and forth, back and forth, a living pendulum. The Master was nowhere to be seen.
Only JJ (much like Lamar himself) had separated himself from the rest- no, his mind insisted, seemingly out of nowhere. Judas. He's called Judas in the dark. He sat with one knee drawn to his chest, muscular arms folded as he stared abstractedly into the void of night. The cloud-threaded moonlight cast a greyish pallor onto his olive skin: for a moment that, coupled with the flat line of his chiselled lips and the blackness crowding the slate blue of his eyes, made him frighteningly otherworldly, a grim idol carved from stone. But then the thick dark brows drew close, the head tilted, throwing the long and crooked line of an all-too-human nose into sharp relief, and Lamar felt his breath rush from his lungs in mingled shame and relief. JJ- no, Judas had never even perturbed him by day. Why should that be so quick to change come nightfall?
"You alright?" the older man repeated: a bit more slowly this time, but he seemed more concerned than irritated. "You were a bit restless there for awhile."
"Y-yeah, I…." Okay. So he hadn't been as discreet as he'd subconsciously hoped. No surprise there. "I was...dreaming. I think." Bloody crap. Why can't you ever just tell the damned truth? Speak the hell up? Huh, idiot? Why can't you?
"You think." It was a rhetorical question, of course, but there was a gentle, almost teasing lilt to Judas's low voice that hadn't been there before, and Lamar felt himself relax, felt the incessant nagging of his internal mantra cease, just slightly. "Slightly" was better than nothing, though, and thus he found himself moving to sit beside the lieutenant, heedless of both the tingling in his now-asleep legs and the profound recklessness of the decision.
On the other hand, Judas didn't seem to mind. He never did, or at least he never let it show. Three times today, when the Master had told a story and given them all its lesson, when the others had moved, puppy-like, to the next game without stopping to think the previous one through, Judas had moved to Lamar's side (as he tried to make sense of the Master's words in silence, not wanting to look stupid or annoy anybody by asking for clarification) and explained the meanings behind the parables in more depth. He'd neither rushed nor twitched with impatience, though surely he must have wanted to join the others as much as Lamar thought he himself did, and though even his efforts would go wasted for hours to come, they had by no means gone unappreciated. If it was possible to create a family out of ten completely disparate souls in less than a day, the Master had done it...trouble was, no one in said family seemed to like Lamar all too much. No one, that is, but the Master Himself...and Judas.
On the other hand (he wasn't quite sure when he'd run out of hands), the Master loved them all. It was His way, it had to be. And He wasn't exactly here right now to agree with or argue Lamar's assessment, but Judas was. Never mind that he couldn't get a read on who or even what Judas did like (and he prided himself on his ability to read people; sometimes it seemed about the only thing he was good at besides playing music); never mind that the two of them had just spent what felt like an eternity sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in silence. He wasn't being turned away, and felt too grateful for that simple kindness to sully the moment with words.
...For awhile, anyway. Never let it be said he didn't try. "I d-didn't wake you up...did I?" he asked softly, hating the way his voice trembled, Goddammit he wasn't a child- and yet...and yet. He was powerless to stop it. Always had been.
"...No." Not a word so much as a sigh, weighed down by the sort of tiredness no amount of sleep could erase. "You didn't."
"Okay." More silence. The ubiquitous roar of city traffic, unsilenced even at this late hour, came to their ears oddly muted, as if from another world. Lamar winced away from it anyway. "Where is He?" No need to explain who He was, they both knew. Perhaps too well.
Judas laughed, hard and sharp, the sound cracking the stillness of the night in two for the half-second it rang in the air. "Wish I knew. Just up and left like someone'd dragged Him off by a leash. I tried to follow Him, but…." He shrugged then, helplessly, the movement and sentiment out of place on such a proud man. "He goes where none of us can fathom."
XXX
Lamar glanced down at his hands, watched dumbly as they picked at loose threads on the green wool of his sweater. He glanced at Judas's hands, one clenched around his bicep, the other fisted in thick hair. They were a working man's hands: broad and calloused and flecked all over with scars. For some reason those hands troubled him; they looked too much like the hanged man's from his dream- and for once the fact that he remembered the images of said dream gave him no solace. The hands were too familiar, the words too strange, for any such thing to even breathe in his mind's vicinity. Where did the Master go, that none of them could follow? Why did His voice whisper Kingdom of my Father, blood of the covenant, never again, Kingdom, Father, blood, Heaven, God-! why, and why in his mind, his ear, so clearly that he was sure Judas had to hear it, too? But perhaps he did; why else would he lower his head onto his arms like that, quickly but not quickly enough to hide the flash of pain in his eyes? ...As though the words that tugged at Lamar's ears like cold (but not unpleasant) winds struck through his like lightning.
Without consciously deciding to do so, he laid his head on Judas's shoulder, feeling the other man's tension beneath his cheek as the rough fabric of the other man's jacket scratched him in rising. Probably he was depriving himself somehow by refusing to analyze the nightmare and the whispers in greater depth, but when so little else in his world made sense...why should he ruin a moment's acceptance, a moment's peace, with thoughts of other mens' dying futures? ...Even if those "other men" did have Judas's hands, the Master's voice. But that had to mean nothing- he had only met them today, this day that might well be the best of his life. He was no sage, no prophet, to see a future's truth in dreams. And he wanted no part in a future bathed with blood. He wanted this: the Master's teachings, his love, his terrible jokes. Herb and Gilmer's clowning, Joanne's showing off, Sonia's teasing, Jeffrey's songs. Peggy's sweet smiles, Robin's bright laughs. Judas's calm slate eyes and rasping voice and laborer's arms, his willingness to stay even when the others left, even when he, too, was lost in his own mind. He wanted all of this, more than he'd ever wanted anything else in all his life.
And so he fought to push the dream as far back into the broken mousetrap of his memory as possible. He had seen enough blood, drowned himself in that of a family drained dry of all but tears for far too long. The past was the demon's song, the present the chorus of angels, and he would not let his Heaven on Earth die. Not tonight, or any night following.
...Yeah, that ending is a total copout. It was almost 3 by that point. I was running out of steam. XD Also, I HIGH-KEY ship Lamar and Judas (that has nothing to do with the fact that our production's Judas was my prom date, although...that did happen). I'm not at all ashamed of it. Still, the optimism hurts. For anyone who's seen the show (or Jesus Christ Superstar, which I based the dream off of), you know what I mean. :(