Author's Notes: Got back from Otakon with a twisted ankle, three blisters, a black eye and interesting stories for the next two years. I'm really quite pleased with myself; I need to get into my sword fights with people.

I'm also signed up for classes next semester. I'm only taking four and I made it so I only have school three days a week. Of course, all these classes have homework (cue the dramatic horror music), so I'll be working on the two other weekdays that I'll be sleeping in, but no matter. I got the courses I wanted, so life at the moment is looking fairly bright.

Except that no one is posting in any of the RP's I have running…And because my grandmother is up terrorizing – oop, I mean visiting – the family I am absolutely forced to hide in my room and zone out in front of the internets.

Anyone interested in RPing with me? I'm desperate.


Glimpses 7


1980 A. D. or 1994 A. D.


I was screaming, pounding my fists against the walls and door until they went numb and bled, then I pounded some more. I was blind without my glasses, but I could See everything in a mad struggle with my senses as the medications took effect. Soon enough I would be in a stupor, helpless in the hands of my visions. Tears were streaming down my cheeks, staining the neck of my hospital-issue shirt. My bare feet were freezing, scrabbling across the cool linoleum as I jammed my shoulder against the door.

"Let me out! Please…Make them stop!" I was begging the cold pair of eyes that watched me. Student doctors, come to see the crazy boy, youngest in the ward, suffering from such acute delirium he could barely get through a day without screaming. I'd been here since I was six, when my mother thought I was possessed by the devil and priests couldn't get rid of it.

Fingernails broke as I scrapped at the steel door, and I hiccupped, my sobs quieting as the lull of chemical sleep began to pull at me. It was getting harder to fend off the dreamy quality the Now took on, when everything seemed to slow down and everywhere was a comfortable place to lie down, even the hard floor. I was many men at once, all the same man, but someone else with every passing moment. Some days I spoke fluent Japanese, other days German, other days I would take on a slight accent someone once placed as Irish, and yet other days I knew nothing, my voice soft and twangy with thick Georgian accent.

They said I was multiple personality. They said I was schizophrenic. They said I was the puppet of demons. They all dammed me to this hell, where every moment I was subjected to the forces that threw my mind and body around like my sister's rag doll. I couldn't walk down the hall without pausing, seeing future laid over future over present like some kind of ghostly film I couldn't pull away. I was kept calm through pills and electroshock, but it never lasted long. I was growing immune to those chemical hits and the EST only seemed to make my visions worse, my mind unable to handle the constant input of whatever fed me what I saw.

For it was the future I saw. There was no doubt about it. I jumped at sounds before I heard them, could tell fortunes to the young nurses without having to look at their palms and find them pleased the next day that what I said had come true. I knew when they were coming to put me through one of their spontaneous exams, when they would test my reflexes and ask me questions. Always questions, always interested in what I'd do next or say next, but never what I meant. They didn't know anything about me.

I was stretched on the floor on my room now, softly crying as I drifted into my dreams. There is no sleep for me, only dreams, and another form of consciousness. I am always deprived of sleep, my mind refusing to obey and rest for even a moment. My fingers close around something soft, and I open my eyes again.

I find myself lying in a bed, my head on a down-soft pillow and my skin warmed by thick comforters and the body that is pressed against me. I lean down and smell the hair there, fine as spider silk, fragrant with some sweet shampoo. I can feel strands of the wild mane against my cheek and a strong arm over my waist, the tips of fingers pressed into the small of my back. That fire-orange head lifts and I am drowned by eyes so blue it mocks even the ocean. And such mocking eyes, a pair that laughs at death and love and stand-up comedy with equal fervor; they were wild eyes, barely lucid eyes, understanding eyes. These eyes knew everything about me, that long nose and madman smile laughing at me as well, laugh at my foolish attempts to escape Fate and God and Tradition.

It was to this man that I dedicated Anarchy to; it was for this man that I committed genocide.

For one man, one fucked-up asshole of a man.

"What is it, Brad?" he asks and his voice is like nails on a chalkboard, fire alarms and gunshots. He laughs softly and noses at my chin, eyes expectant for my reply, but I am taken again by his beauty. He is beautiful, like walking poetry, like chuckling murder.

"You're spouting the weirdest thoughts…was it a dream?" His hand pushes into my hair and holds the back of my head. I am caught, I can't speak, the languor of pills makes me slow. I think I was crying, my face is still hot and my eyes still sore. A headache is already mounting and my jaw aches from clenching.

"Brad?" He is worried now, fearful because I didn't respond right away. Perhaps I always answer him immediately, perhaps that is my habit.

"Schuldig," I finally whisper, bowing my face into his hair again, the vibrant color as comforting as sunlight after a night of seeing ghosts. I am clutching at him, holding him as close to me as possible, checking to make sure that this isn't a dream, that I can really feel him.

"Should I pinch you?" he offers, but there is no longer laughter. He is truly nervous now, and I know that this isn't like me at all. I am a man now, grown up and free of that awful asylum, with a closet full of suits and an apartment of my own, a lover and a gun and a mission…Clinging is something only a boy would do.

But I can't let go, not yet.

"It's the Now, I promise," he murmurs against me, sharp fingernails pinching the skin of my back hard enough to make me flinch. "It was just a dream, a memory. It's over now."

"Don't lie," I sighed, "I don't want lies."

There is a long pause where he goes still again, so still I think he has fallen back to sleep. Then he startles me by speaking, his mind slipping against my thoughts and clearing them for me like a maid after the dust bunnies under a bed. Soon, I might be able to rest again, with his telepathy keeping vigil for me.

"I wasn't lying. Go back to sleep."

I close my eyes and the fluorescent light and white walls stream through my eyelids. I press my face against the pillow to cut them off.


Fin Chapter 7

Please Review


To My Readers:

eva84: Something in the back of my head believes that Brad Crawford wouldn't be pleased about being called 'sweet', even if you are right. (smile) Thank you; there are more short bits to come.

fullmetalguitarHe's only stealing cigarettes…(laugh)

Rori Barton So it seems…(Brad-like glower) Well hey, free cigs. Who's Crawford to pass those up, eh? Cigarettes are expensive!