Robert had been very, very wrong.
The first time she had surrendered to that damn song had been the easiest of the set she had done so far in the last couple of days. Seeing red, then blacking out, coming to and fighting her way out of it had been a walk in the park for the few minutes it had lasted.
The episodes lasted a matter of minutes. Not enough to do major damage to herself or the other two, but enough . She had apparently been lost so much she had bruised her wrists, abdomen and shins to Hell trying to break out of the restraints.
The next few times had been much, much worse. They progressed bit by bit from there. The instructions had been simple from there, each time she went in. 'Try to stay in the red, stay lucid.' She had tried a number of times, and at the fourth attempt, it had seemed too much like the trials. She had come out of her haze and promptly vomited on the floor, and Robert had promised they were done until she gave the okay- if she so wished.
You have to, she had to remind herself. He's not Jacob. This is your call. You're safe. You're okay. You're okay.
It was even worse from there. After a few more tries she had gotten to the point where she could stay away from the blackout. She got to enjoy that, but the next step was trying to control what her thoughts drifted to once the conditioning kicked in.
Robert had suggested starting with thinking of her friends when she was under. It had apparently worked for the one who ended up going back to Jacob days later.
The concept alone had terrified her, figuring something would go wrong and she'd end up inclined to kill her friends on sight. It was enough so spawn nightmares of herself doing just that starting the second night they had tried it, and kept up from there.
She had woken up on the sixth screaming from that one. It had taken a solid ten minutes that ticked by like years to get the ghost of Nick's blood off her hands- and for her hands to stop shaking on top of that.
She had half a mind to find a radio and call the man to try to remind herself he was alive and okay if she wasn't terrified of losing her damn mind at his voice alone after all that.
She had laid back down and tried to will herself back to sleep to no avail. The shakes were back within a few seconds, considering going back to sleep would probably bring that same nightmare back, probably with a different person. It had almost made her miss the damn Bliss-dream where Joseph had shown her what the Voice told him the fate of the world would be. That had felt so real, instilled so much doubt in her. That wasnothing compared to this. She pressed herself deeper into the cot Robert had set up for her. It was one of the thinnest, most uncomfortable things she had ever been on, which didn't help things, but given the circumstances, she wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
The door to the room she was in cracked open.
She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to stop shaking. "Sorry. I'm okay."
"I thought I asked you to stop lying to me."
The foot of the bed dipped. She cracked an eye open and went to sit up when she saw John sit at the foot of the bed.
John ran a hand up her arm and pressed down on her elbow to stop her. Once she stopped moving, he moved his hand to her thigh."Easy,"
"What're you doing?" she muttered.
"Figured you might need someone," he replied.
She cast an accusatory glance at his hand, still splayed on her thigh."Not really in the mood right now-"
John scoffed, but didn't withdraw. "To talk to. You know, as fantastic as the sex is, there is more to… this then that after all this, isn't there? We've both mentioned we're all we've got. You need to talk, talk."
"The last time you tried to get me to talk-"
"Circumstances were very, very different," John cut her off.
Nicolette frowned, but accepted the answer for what it was. She sighed and finally sat up, and he let her this time. She opened her mouth, then firmly shut it and looked away,
John sighed. "Think I won't understand ? Think I don't care ?" John asked, parroting himself from all those weeks ago yet again. "Frustrating, isn't it?"
She shook her head. "John…" He had every right going back to that conversation, but she didn't have the time or mental capacity for it.
" Nicolette," he countered. "Let me in. I'm not your enemy anymore."
She huffed and gave him a dirty look. "My nightmares are probably your good dreams, for starters. I just woke up from gutting Nick with a fucking SMG. Last night, I shot Sharky between the eyes. That's just my fucking imagination after doing this. It wasn't the fucking conditioning."
"We've been at this nonstop for a while. You've got a lot going on in that head of yours. It was bound to happen."
"Yeah, well, I was kind of hoping the madness or death would come later. Not right off the bat."
"Hasn't happened yet. This is you we're talking about. We've got a long ways to go before anything gets to your head."
"Tell that to my subconscious."
"You've just got to keep at it."
She finally turned her entire body to face him. "You're not the one going through it. You're not the one…" she sighed. "You ever have… I guess you would call them Bliss dreams?"
John nodded after a moment.
Nicolette leaned back. "Joseph showed me the Collapse in mine. It felt so fucking real that I started to believe it," she went on. When he arched an eyebrow, she kicked him with her heel lightly. "Don't start. You were still all evidently batshit insane. I said started to. Not did ."
"What's your point?"
"I haven't dreamt that vividly since. I felt the wave from those nukes. I felt Joseph touching me. I just felt my best friends' blood-"
"It's not the Bliss this time. And just because it happened when you were Blissed our doesn't mean it will."
"Says the guy who believes the Collapse is coming."
"Says the gal who has never let hypothetical odds stacked against her win before now."
She curled up again, and shot him another look when he lay down next to her. "Then look at it in the physical sense. It felt too real like those Bliss dreams. You don't think he's slipping Bliss into me somehow, do you?"
"Considering he's the most nauseatingly positive person I've met and he pointed a gun at us a week ago, no. Do you really think he'd do that?"
"You and I are sitting here having a casual conversation and you tried to torture me a matter of weeks ago. Anything is possible."
John remained silent for that one. After a few seconds, he sighed. "Stop thinking so hard. You'll get through this. You're hard to kill."
"What if I don't?" she countered. She wanted to flinch again. Considering who she was asking, she knew she was really reaching for anybody's opinion. So she did need someone to talk to. He was right. Again. Fuck.
"Doubt's never stopped you before."
"You're not going to quit, are you?"
"By the sound of it, neither are you. But have you ever actually won any of our conversations?" he countered.
She went to sit up, and he braced his hand on her collar bone to stop her. He tapped the tattoo a couple of times and then looked thoughtful for a moment. "I've got a lot riding on you. Don't let that tenacity fail us now."
"And there's the self-serving bullshit," she countered.
He smirked. "There's Wrath. Prove me wrong if you're so convinced to fail."
She went to retort again, then realized she couldn't. Because she had always operated on spite. Her entire early relationship with the man in front of her could attest to that. It was reverse psychology to the extreme, but he did it well- and enough that the fact that he was asking her to fail there got her back into throwing herself at the task of surviving the whole damned thing and rolling with the punches. How the Hell he had managed that, and judging by the look on his face he had fully intended for that to happen, she would never know. "Fucking lawyer," she hissed, then turned sharply onto her other side. She felt him laugh against her back and elbowed him in the ribs. She attempted to get comfortable, ready to go back to sleep- again, out of spite to rob him of the opportunity of other argument. The best and worst part- it had worked, and she was out cold within a few minutes. The nightmares didn't stop, but with a little extra brain power and determination, they were far less grisly.
She woke up to find John had fallen asleep with her, arm tossed over her waist. Her stomach churned when she realized she didn't exactly mind it.
The days following weren't much different.
She'd go under, fight her way back, under, back, under and back again, rinse, repeat, she'd call it a day and go back to her room, and John would follow to check in after a while.
The third day of finding out how to fight her way back had been particularly hard on her. That particular nightmare being her killing Joey and Earl like she might've had the Sheriff not shoved her out of the truck. And the actual song faded into Jacob singing it, which made the whole thing worse.
She had bolted awake, hyperventilating and sure as Hell that she wasn't going to get sleep after that. John had shown up and she had practically jumped him, determined to have some sort of distraction to get her mind off of that last damned image in her head. He had gone to say something the second she went for his belt; but she had kissed him to stop him and promptly yanked him back towards the cot, uttered a determined "yes", and that had been enough for him to understand that it wasn't the time for talking.
She was mortified the next day when Robert had trouble looking either of them in the face. Still, a handful of hours later she had her first success in fighting her way back from 'The Red Zone' as they had come to call it, so that was the bigger priority by far.
Her subconscious had been kind enough to keep her sleep nightmare free that night.
John had stopped in, looped an arm around her and waited until she was asleep all the same.
She had started to wonder if it was some bullshit learned dependency tactic until she realized it could've been him getting the dependency. He had been the one coming to her. He had mentioned them only having each other three times.
Then again, of course the guy who had lost everything courtesy of his brother would latch onto anything familiar and hold on for dear life.
Shit, she was even sympathizing with him now. Times change. The memory of her swearing she would never do such a thing after he had told her about his family life the first time in the bunker came to mind.
The next few days, things had been stable, and she only vomited twice- which was utterly sad that it was an accomplishment at that rate.
It took her a number of tries, but she finally managed to keep herself grounded and out of the red for the most part. It was then that Robert had instructed her to try to focus on anything and everything to distract her from that song in the moment, and had introduced the concept of thinking of her friends and all the positives that came with that.
The following night had been nightmare free again, and she had woken up absolutely beaming that things had finally started to turn around.
A couple of days later she had managed to stay nearly out of the red the entire time.
Two more, and her vision was clear but her head still pounded as the song went on.
Robert had dug his heels in about giving her another day of rest the next day. He had left, citing a 'previous engagement.' The other two figured that it had something to do with his family. Nicolette was reluctant to ask for the same reason that John was smart enough not to. The last thing they needed was for genuine curiosity to come off as a threat.
The pair had gone out to sweep the surrounding area for Peggies as a precaution, considering the last few times they thought they had been okay and safe they had been as wrong as could be.
The area was almost entirely devoid of any life outside of a couple of stray deer. One of those "too quiet" kind of deals.
Nicolette had muttered something about Joseph setting something up until she remembered that supposedly no one knew about this particular place.
John, on the other hand, merely offered a bitter "Maybe the Voice told him," and then headed back towards the building.
She had to run to keep up with him and only made it when he made it into the waiting room of the building and dropped into one of the chairs. She had sat next to him quicky and allowed silence for a while, and then, "... you know you can talk to me, too, right?" It was a terrible joke at her own expense, she knew, so she offered an apologetic smile when he set her with a disapproving look. "You never really elaborated on your whole viewpoint with this whole thing, Joseph, his visions, the Collapse-"
"There's nothing to elaborate. It's to separate things. He's - was my brother. Like it or not now, I owed him my life. I loved him, madness and all. But it comes with the territory of being a lawyer to yes people who 'hear voices' to death…"
"But you built this entire thing on his-"
"You aren't the only one who dreamed about the Collapse and felt it," John cut her off. "Take Joseph out of that, take away the Voice, consider what's going on in the world, it's a Hell of a thing to not start believing in."
She stared at the floor for a while. "Yeah, maybe…"
He scoffed again, but stayed quiet otherwise.
Robert came back the next day, and they continued their work.
Within a matter of hours, "Only You" only prompted a tolerable lightheadedness that she figured might as well have come from the developed PTSD from the entire damned thing. The more important part was that from what she had experienced, she could work on it from there. There was no blind rage, no bloodlust- she was just about free. Nic 1, Jacob… well, at least over 50 by now, but she had finally, finally gotten a victory against him. She almost wished he was alive to see it. Almost.
Still, she was desperate to finally be out of that chair for more than a few hours, and Robert seemed just as desperate to let her get out of it.
He had ushered them out the front door, but not before promising he'd still be there if anything else went wrong or backtracked. It was, after all, a first victory over the fucked up universe for him, too. He had passed her the music box back and they had been on their way.
Nicolette was beside herself the rest of the day, grinning all the while. She was even grateful that John didn't even dare start anything with her to ruin it. Probably knew better by then.
They had gone back to Sharky's, still cautious about being around crowds. The man had spotted them, cheered as loud as Nicolette had ever heard him, locked her in another bear hug and promptly rambled for a full five minutes about how he knew she'd make it out, and she had never been so happy to hear the man go on and on in her life.
It was a few hours by the time he had let them out of his sight for a while.
They had gone to his bunker for the night, Nicolette flopped down into the lower bed, nearly annoyed at herself when John lay next to her and she didn't think much of it. She didn't have long to linger on that, however, because exhaustion hit her quickly, victory or not; and she was out in seconds.
Naturally, it was that night that her subconscious decided to screw her over one last time and pulled her into another dream, just like the Bliss ones.
But this one wasn't a memory, or a 'what could have been.'
She was back at Joseph's compound. It was just the two of them- there was the ghost of a conversation she couldn't make out. She had read him his rights, shoved him around and cuffed him, and there it was, the Bliss dream feeling all over again: she was aware she was dreaming, but skin had never felt like skin in her dream- people were never this warm in her dreams, no one felt so fucking real-
And then a fucking nuke had gone off in the distance, with Joseph looking right at it . And then another. And another. A roar had started up in her ears, but Joseph suddenly humming Amazing Grace was still suddenly front and center in her brain, and then just as one of the shockwaves from whichever bomb was closest was about to hit, just as she started to wake up, his voice came up again, it's usual even tone, but there was something mocking behind it: " I was right ."
She woke with a start, and it took her a minute to realize where she was. She was at Sharky's place. She wasn't at the Compound, Joseph wasn't there, she hadn't just been wiped out of existence by a bomb. The movement was apparently quick and drastic enough to apparently crack her forehead into John's if the man's answering grunt of pain was any indication. "Christ, I'm never sleeping again…" she hissed to herself.
She and her mother had always combined two idioms. If weird little omens came in threes, it was a sign. She was three for three with dreams that bordered on Joseph's insane ramblings, and now it was finally, finally enough to get her to question had finally gone over that particular edge of the proverbial cliff. She wasn't just looking over the edge into the endless dark abyss of it anymore. She still knew the man was insane, but the Collapse had felt too real twice now. John was onto something with his own theory about the whole situation.
John turned away from her. "Go back to sleep. Everyone's fine-"
"No, no they weren't. That one wasn't me. That was... everyone was not fine. That's as far from fine as my fucking imagination has let anyone be!"
John turned back again, far more awake than he was seconds ago, like he knew exactly what she was going to say.
She swallowed hard. "So uh… that… conversation that we had when I almost killed you…y'know, 'what if Joseph's right'? 'What if he's not crazy'?" she forced out. "What then?"
John gave her a look that was half sympathetic, half 'I told you so.' "That's the question of the century. Welcome to Hell, Deputy. Population: us, Joseph, and the rest of the Peggies."
"Fuck."
"That about sums it up."
