A/N: So this has been kicking around on my computer for a while. Since I finally posted to my other story I felt I should get this up. I was exploring an idea I had about the Noah and how they seem to perceive reality differently. I remembered the opening of Hill House, a very quiet, low key but creepy psychological horror and how the Earl said the Noah were awake and the story clicked. Enjoy the Tyki torture...
Disclaimer: D. Gray-man, Tyki and Road are not mine but they're fun to play with...
THE DREAMS OF TYKI MIKK
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.
Even larks are supposed by some to dream.
Hill House – not sane- stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within...
whatever walked there, walked alone.
-Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
The Noah did not dream.
It was quite a while after he had become one of their number before Tyki Mikk realized this.
As he recalled, when he was human, his dreams had been the usual stuff and nonsense, sometimes frightening, occasionally pleasant.
Then he began to awake as a Noah.
They became a horror.
He remembered writhing in excruciating pain, as unspeakable visions assailed him, threaded through with dark and evil whispers, screams, that were somehow worse.
It was so bad he would have clawed out his eyes, punctured the drums of his ears, if he thought it would end the brutal assault of sound and vision.
If he thought it would keep him sane.
He might have done so, if one day they hadn't suddenly stopped.
And he was Noah.
The wonder of that power and the dark hunger that accompanied it occupied him fully.
The whispering visions, those horrible dreams, were gone and he was relieved, then indifferent.
Soon, though, even his strange new life became commonplace and it was then he noted the absence
of anything.
He would close his eyes to black oblivion and wake hours later, rested but somehow... uneasy.
It wasn't a matter of forgetting them, they simply weren't there.
The Noah did not dream.
"Of course not Tyki, but you know what we are, don't you?"
He had brought the revelation to Road, because, really, who else but the one who held the Dreams of Noah might understand?
Among the Noah, she was the youngest in body but the eldest in memory.
And they loved her.
Road Kamelot was frustrating and spoiled, an imperious queen full of willful demands and childish commandments, yet, she held their hearts as she held their dreams. She was their dearest sister, and she mothered them with a frightening intensity.
If Tyki ever had doubts that possession by the Noah constituted a family, Road put them firmly to rest.
Road was terrifying in her cruelty, but her affection for her family was unwavering.
"This world is a dream," she singsonged now, climbing into his lap, " I'm a dream, you're a dream. We're God's dream, or the Devil's dream, or maybe the Duke's."
Of course, Road was quite mad. All the Noah were mad.
He once thought of himself as the only sane one in the lot.
He didn't believe it, of course, not really, but it was a comforting thought all the same.
Wrinkling her nose, she plucked the cigarette from his mouth and flicked it into the fire, then curled herself against his chest. His arms went around her automatically.
"But I'll tell you a secret," she whispered, "This is really my dream, and, you know, as dreams go, I think you're one of my favourites Tyki."
Mad or not, questions answered or not, Tyki was secretly pleased.
Road was mad but the idea she had placed in his head appealed to him.
Tyki decided to create his own dream.
Perhaps it was a mundane dream, this dream that resembled nothing more than the usual grinding existence of humanity. He worked, ate rough, burned meals- if he ate at all- smoked, gambled.
He made friends- Crack and Momo- and with them drank too much, and laughed.
He awoke a long disused kindness taking in the frail, blue-eyed, golden haired Eeze, and took pleasure in preserving a life instead of ending it.
He followed the mining camps and got headaches and aching muscles and an occasional racking cough from coal dust and cheap cigarettes.
Still, it was his dream and he loved it. His Noah memories became like half remembered shadows in the light, and for a little while he would forget.
Then the Earl would wake him and his strange, absolute, dreamless reality would consume him once more.
Black to White. White to Black.
Nobleman to miner. Vagabond to assassin.
One moment, plunging his hand through an enemy's chest.
The next, presenting Eeze with the shiny silver buttons that he always seemed to find in his pockets with a faint air of puzzlement.
Tyki sometimes felt like a pendulum. Swinging back and forth between the worlds. Or at least, he liked to think of a pendulum. Because when it slowed, even when it stopped, he could remain equally between the dreams. One foot in the White, the other in the Black.
But he was not a pendulum. He would not be allowed to rest between the worlds. He knew one day he would have to choose. So he dealt with it the same way he dealt with other unpleasant things.
He didn't think about it.
One day he looked in the mirror to find the Noah, always a shadowy presence in the darkness behind him, had drawn nearer.
It stood close behind his shoulder, smiling at him hungrily.
Tyki began to wonder if, someday, the Noah would be at the forefront and he himself nothing more than a ghost at it's shoulder.
Shortly after that, he stopped looking into mirrors altogether.
Tyki was afraid.
But he did not want to taint his dream so he sealed his fears away.
Vagabonding again he met a boy who cheated at cards better than he did.
It was an amusing addition to his dream. If the boy wore a black coat with familiar silver buttons it was no concern to him, though it did cut his Black and White worlds uncomfortably close.
It was a relief when the train rolled away, taking the troubling boy with it, but the relief was short lived.
The Duke and his Black reality called.
This time with a list.
It was a long list and Tyki found himself wondering, should he find his way to the end of it, if he would be ever able to dream in White again.
He did not want to lose his friends, his human life.
Himself.
Ah, but his Black self sang to him. A siren promising dark pleasures. A promise of pain and of blood spreading invisibly through the folds of an exorcist's uniform. A song of belonging, of family, of a fiercely adoring little girl who wrapped his dreams up within her own.
The choice was impossible, but he feared it would never be his to make.
He cut a trail in blood from Spain to China and in the dark of a bamboo forest, watched a traitor come apart under the careful ministrations of his hungry, butterfly-like Teeze.
He turned his own hunger on the one who had failed to save him. An exorcist that waited in horror and fury.
The boy from the train.
He did not belong here.
He belonged in the White dream with Eeze and Crack and Momo.
Still, he could not overlook that coat and it's shining buttons this time.
The train and the cards were long ago and far away in the White and Tyki was now in the Black.
He truly regretted killing Allen Walker. He wouldn't be able to dream him anymore.
White dreams and Black nightmares twisted in upon themselves.
All was madness and confusion as the Ark broke apart around them.
Someone had dreamed Allen Walker alive again but other exorcists took his place in oblivion.
But his family was lost too... dragging the tears from his eyes as they fell.
The playground of the Ark was transposed over the bars of a cage and Tyki no longer knew if they imprisoned the exorcists or if they were trapped with them.
And then there was Road.
When had Allen Walker gone from his dream to Road's?
Even when he'd been Road's favorite, she'd never kissed him, her kisses were reserved for the Duke alone.
Yet... she'd kissed the boy.
He was being replaced as Road's dream. Of course, he didn't believe that all of this was only in the mind of a mad child. Still, some primitive fear remained.
If Road stopped dreaming him would he cease to exist?
The Noah's cold grip was on his shoulder.
In the dark, the monster shivered.
In the nightmare Road was consumed by the fire and crumbled to ash. He was shrieking and scrabbling against the dark but his body had become a prison.
And then Tyki was consumed too.
When he came to himself again, God knew how much later, his body was racked with the violent tremors of unshed tears.
He felt a small hand curl into his.
"You're awake," said a voice.
He couldn't seem to stop shaking.
"You're dead."
Soft laughter, like chimes, answered him.
"That's not a nice thing to say."
He shook his head. "You burned away..."
"I'm alive Tyki..."
Then the dead girl drew his hand to her face.
He flinched, expecting the flesh to turn to ashes under his touch but it was soft and warm. Road climbed onto the bed, wrapping her arms tightly around his neck.
"You're so cold, Tyki," and then she was pressing her warm little body against his and covering his face with feather light kisses.
"I'm sorry I said I wouldn't kiss you..." She sounded as though she had been crying- but could Noah cry?- He couldn't remember, but he was shaking even more violently now and he pulled her closer.
"But you burned, you burned, you burned," he keened. "and I... I was drowning..."
She pulled away and pressed her tiny fingers against his lips, firmly stopping up his words.
"It was just a dream Tyki, a very bad dream," she said sternly.
"I think that's called a nightmare," he murmured with a flash of his old humour, muffled beneath her hands.
She giggled. "A nightmare then, in any case, that's all it was."
It was a lie but he loved her for it and nodded silently.
Pleased, she curled into his side and was asleep, so quickly he wondered how long she had been watching over him.
A dream.
He wished it was a dream. Even prayed, as mad as that was, it was a dream.
But he knew it wasn't so...
When he closed his eyes there was only dark oblivion.
The Black and the White of the world, the dirt of the mines beneath his fingernails and the blood on his hands and the little mad girl sleeping at his side... all were absolute reality.
The Noah did not dream.
God help them all.
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality...
not sane...
by itself...
holding darkness within...
whatever walked there,
walked alone.
Music: Innocent When You Dream (78) by Tom Waits