Title: Screams
Author: BehrBeMine
Fandom: 'Flowers in the Attic'
Summary: The night of Cory's death, Carrie falls into a horrific dream that won't let go.
Word Count: 726
Disclaimer: These characters are not mine. They belong to V.C. Andrews. The words, however, come from my head.
Pairing: Not that kind of fic. It's about Carrie's loss of her twin brother.
Rating: PG-13 and dark
Feedback: Always appreciated.
Warnings: Extreme darkness, and it's about Cory's death.
Note: tamingthemuse Prompt #41: Asylum. fanfic100 Prompt #03: Ends.
- -
She can hear the screams and nothing else.
She wants them to stop, for they're making her head ache, piercing her skull with pain every time they erupt, one after another.
Outside of her body, Chris and Cathy are reaching out to touch her, to stop her body from flailing in all directions. Her limbs, so tired and weak during wakeful hours, seek to claw their way out of the sound that is burying her alive. As if drowning, she reaches the farthest possible length, grasping at something to save her, but there's nothing in the water she sees in her deadliest dream. Her hands merely fall through, as she sinks further and further from the surface.
Terrified, she begs God for Cory to come before her tightly shut eyes, so that she can open them, and see something other than death.
But Cory is dead. She heard it come from her own mother's lips. That it was "...too late."
The last time she heard that word, death, it had taken Daddy. She didn't understand it fully for the longest time, but every day she was aware that he was gone, and had left a gaping hole in her family.
This time, she understands its meaning. Cory will also be gone, every day from this one forward. She will never, ever see him again. She and Cory might as well share their organs, for half of her heart is absent from her chest, and a dull ache inhabits that empty space, making it hurt to think, and see, and breathe. Just like the water she keeps falling through. The sunlight at the top of the bottomless pit shines above the water, as always out of her reach. The further she falls, the more the sunlight starts to fade, as she reaches depths which it cannot penetrate.
Suddenly she is alone in the dark of an empty attic, like a cleared out version of the one above the only bedroom she can remember. Water now streams down from the tips of her hair to wet the floor below her, which is dry. Darkness has replaced the water that engulfed her seconds before.
She's terrified of the darkness, her eyes rapidly seeking out something white, the protective ring of flowers on the attic floor that would save her from the monsters, the death, just behind her. Somewhere in the darkness that covers her like a blanket. Cory is gone, and soon, she fears, she will be, too.
The screams come from every direction, echoing off the wooden walls to jar her brain around in her head. She reaches out for something to pull her away from this miserable place, and clasps a paper flower, hung from very high above her on a decorative string. She can't see anything but the flower, one of Cathy's designs, dark blue construction paper weaving around bright blue sequins. It's a somber thing, the beauty of the paper flower, and it makes Carrie sad that it is all that accompanies her, now that her twin lies somewhere under the ground.
Carrie isn't one to dream, except when very ill. Cathy is the dreamer of the Dresden dolls. She's never known how much Carrie or Cory heard of what she's said supposedly in private. Never known that her little sister could hear her foreboding whispers to Chris, who always called her a loon, "but an imaginative one," for being able to think up things that screwy while unconscious.
She continues to thrash her limbs about in the darkness surrounding her, wanting to forget Cathy's scary dreams and focus on the more fanciful ones, with white unicorns and dark princes who rescue her and marry her for always. She can see a castle before her, with unicorns that make tears fall from her eyes as she eyes them closer.
The unicorns are dead.
Frantically, Chris and Cathy fight to rid their baby sister of her terror, but they look desperately to one another as long minutes pass and she won't wake up. Cathy cries, because she just knows the grandmother's going to walk in, and lock Carrie into an asylum. Or something equally as terrible.
Stuck in her world of terror, Carrie longs to feel something good again.
She can hear the screams and nothing else. If only she knew they were coming from herself.
- -
end