A/N: Okay, so, life is life and I haven't had time to write for a while. Not sure when that'll change. However, this sorta hit me, and I took some time out to type it up. No real prompt filled here, it just kinda hit me.

Four Nightmares Dreamed

01. Monsters in the Dark

He was four when he had his first nightmare. Lying in bed, alone, with the sheets twisted around his ankles like snakes, monsters' fingers at his legs. He screamed, cried, and woke, alone, his shirt soaked in sweat and his face wet with tears.

There was no one to comfort him then, no parent to barge in and wrap gentle arms around his shoulders, to dab at his eyes and tell him, the monsters weren't there.

Aunt Grizelda had slept through every nightmare he ever had, and the Once-ler remembered the one time he had fled his bed, his raggedy toy bear clutched to his chest as he toed the thresh hold to his mother's bedroom. It had been instinct to guide him there in the night, and a more terrible instinct that held him.

He feared waking her, and didn't move.

Worse, he feared her rejection if he did.

02. Gone, Not Forgotten

Ted was four when the nightmares began, innocuous as they started. Little flashes of fear prior to waking, the panic and a frenzied thought of Don't go, Daddy!, hardly remembered in the morning. He remembered hands that would find him in the darkness, soft, slender hands that grabbed his shoulders and lifted him awake before the nightmares grew worse, and he would look at his mother's face and see her own tears.

He was too young to understand, but the knowledge of gone was nothing new, and a mother's tears bring out those of a child.

As they held each other in the night, neither really knew who was comforting who, the mother or the child, but the togetherness was what was important. As his mother would smooth his sheets out and tuck him in, kissing his forehead good night, Ted knew: the nightmares wouldn't come again for that night.

03. Dreams of Obscurity

Alyosius O'Hare never once dreamed in technicolor—the world he grew up in never permitted it. The skies were gray at day, only darker at night, the grounds and forests of stumps barren and dead and lifeless.

Phantoms filled his nights—a plague of forgetfulness, of joining the dead beneath the dead ground as nothing, a nobody, just the trash collector on the streets, another young death of ruined lungs. He didn't expect to live past twenty-seven—so few of the trash collectors did, a combination of bad air and dangerous conditions, where signs oxidized and fell to pieces and rusting machinery broke down.

He lived his life at the bottom, and dreamt of the day his body joined the darkness of the earth, barely more than a name and a date to mark his passing.

Here Lies O'Hare.

Who would remember the trash collector ten years from now?

Nobody.

04. Odd One Out

She never quite… fit. Too tall, too bright, too strange. In a world of plastic, nobody cared for trees. Her classmates were always tapping away at their phones, or reading up on the latest gossip. No one understood the girl in the back, a paintbrush in her hand and a book of trees in her lap.

She laid in bed some nights, the darkness of the ceiling and the remoteness of her mind the only company in the depth of the night. Her blinds were angled, but no starlight ever made it though—blocked by the glowing tree lamp posts outside. She dreamt of never fitting in, of always being too odd. Some were nicer about it, but the fact never changed: she can't carry on their kinds of conversations, never put the right emphasis on her clothes, never messed with make up.

Sometimes, she fears she'll always be alone.

05. Reality

Some nightmares are simply a plague in the night.

The Once-ler gazes outside his window, no matter the time. His nightmare remains, will remain, has remained. A few million tree corpses, a barren land, a wasteland that the animals fled and the sun abandoned.

And it's all his fault, a fact that haunts him in the waking hours as well his sleep. He thinks of things he saw: of hungry animals he now realizes were hungry. Of fish that couldn't hum, swans that couldn't sing.

He thinks of the things he didn't see, but pictures all the same. Of animals dying, giant wheels crushing, the death of thousands of fish and birds and bears he never saw.

He closes his eyes, but what is the good? It lingers in his mind, toxic, like the land he polluted.

Some nightmares are just that: dreams.

His is reality just outside his door.

No idea when the next'll be up, but I felt so bad about just leaving you guys.

So... Review? Take the poll? Leave a prompt? Hope you enjoyed?