Firefly 'Verse – Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep – Chapter 25
By: Suz Mc
Lexi the Blonde had been more than a little pissed when she came back from the bathroom to find her three friends had high tailed it out of the bar and left her behind. Brunette with the Red Nails had received a call on her cell to let her know her boyfriend was spotted with another girl and she and the others had rushed out into the night to hunt him down.
"How could those bitches do that?! Just leave me here?!"
Lexi's buzz was making her just a bit emotional and before she could start crying like chicks were prone to do in that state, Dean hugged an arm around her shoulder. "Don't worry about them, sweetheart. You've still got your bodyguard, right?"
"I rode with them. What am I going to do?" To ease her distress, Lexi grabbed the fresh shot Dean had just bought for himself and sucked it down her throat.
"I'd be glad to give you a ride." And he certainly would love to do just that as he used his sincere model face. Take that, Sammy.
Lexi's mood changed immediately and she wiggled her arm around his waist and hugged herself in against his body. She wasn't upset at all when she shoved a handful of blonde curly hair out of her face and ran the tip of her tongue out of the corner of her mouth to lick the last remaining drop of Jello shot. "You're my knight in shining armor and I bet you have a white horse right outside, don't you, baby?"
He could take a hint and they headed toward the door. "As a matter of fact, I've got a black horse waiting to take you anywhere you want to go, ma'am." She was smoking hot, tucked up under his arm. Even those high heels didn't get her up past his shoulder. His buzz was exactly right to make him warm and ready when Lexi's hand tucked itself just inside the back of his waistband.
Those of us about to get laid say, 'Thank you, Sammy.'"
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The razor sharp edge of a scream was enough to get Sam's body moving seconds before his mind caught up to the action. There were words mixed in with the shrill screaming coming from Emily's room. He had to grab the doorway to keep his bare feet from sliding out from under him when he made it to her room.
"Emily?!" The screaming was coming from the general direction of her bed but the moonlight showed nothing but a violent jumble of covers.
"GO AWAY!!!!!"
The pleading scream came from under the little girl's bed and Sam dropped to his knees, jerking back the blankets that blocked his view. Emily was cowering under the bed frame, her little eyes wide and terrified in the dark.
"It's me, Sweetie. Come out." He reached in to take her hand only to have her withdraw further into the haven of the darkness. "It's me, Uncle Sammy."
"NO! Go away! Go away, monster!" She didn't look at him, just curled on her side, hands plastered against her face, and kept screaming. She ran through the list of people in her world, begging for one of them to help her out of the nightmare that was choking her. Emily's voice rattled as she called for Mama, Daddy, even Uncle Sammy.
Every time he reached, she pulled further away and no matter what Sam said to comfort her, Emily's waking nightmare refused to give way to reality.
"GRANDPA JOHN! PLEASE! I'LL BE GOOD!"
"Emily, you're having a bad dream." He tried to keep his voice calm and smooth in an attempt to soothe down the edges of her panic. "I'm not going to let anything hurt you."
His fingers finally brushed against her arm, sending her into a deeper, ear-splitting terror. She was as far under the bed as she could get and still be out of his reach, when the darkened light bulb beside her bed exploded into life and shattered with enough force to send slivers of glass flying through the room. Blood ran down Sam's cheek as one piece sliced into his skin.
Her sobbing had transformed into a loud, sorrowful wail. Waiting it out, letting her stay trapped in some terrifying nightmare loop, wasn't acceptable. Quickly, he got to his feet and grabbed the bed frame with both hands to pull it off of her. For a few heartbreaking seconds, Emily didn't move. Her tiny body was crunched into a ball, face plastered to the floor to avoid seeing whatever monster was coming for her.
The cool air hit Emily's back before Sam could get his hands on her and she let out a sharp shriek and scrambled away toward the far wall of the bedroom. A few broken shards of the light bulb crunched underneath her knees and hands, leaving little bloody splotches staining the rug. In an instant, she'd covered the ground to huddle against the wall, too deep in her terror to let the pain stop her escape.
"It hurts! Daddy!" Big dark eyes, wild with the image of a phantom monster filling them up, darted across the room looking for a way out, looking for a savior.
Evidently, Sam wasn't the embodiment of a savior. He had become the monster. Quickly, he grabbed the corner of the rug and flipped it away, clearing most of the glass with it. He put a harder edge to his voice. "Wake up, Emily! Now!"
The little girl only sobbed harder, nearly the quality of a seizure as the strength of it took hold of her entire body. Her right hand clawed at some invisible attack on her left arm as she relived being burned mercilessly by the demon.
"Stopstopstopstop!"
Sam was big, enormous compared to the slip of a child in front of him, but his size couldn't match her speed as Emily darted toward the open window, trying to flee her hallucination. It took every inch of his reach coupled with a leap of faith across the floor to get his grip to the back of her nightgown before Emily was able to dive out the open second story window that was her only escape from the monster melting her flesh. The force of that momentum took them both to the floor and Emily became a screaming, twisting mad-girl in Sam's arms.
"Emily, stop! I've got you. Stop." He banded his arms around her tightly, hoping to stop her body so her mind could make a connection with something real.
She'd gone beyond words to some primal roar, throwing her head back toward his face and nearly smashing against Sam's nose. Emily jerked and kicked, one foot knocking both jars of fireflies on the windowsill out into the air to shatter on the ground below.
"What the hell!" Bobby was at the door now, plainly caught off guard by the sight of Sam wrestling on the floor with a screaming banshee in his grasp.
Sam couldn't spare the time to answer. He had to use his last resort to break through Emily's nonstop loop of agony and fear. Freeing his right hand, he struggled to get a grip on Emily's right hand. He'd avoided that contact for almost two weeks because it was a reminder of how far from normal her life was going to be, how far from normal his had been. Emily had said no to that current of power in her veins, now Sam was going to inject it back into her. When he found her palm, he closed around it, flattening their hands together. The bite of a piece of glass sticking out of her hand sliced into his, mixing his blood with the blood already oozing out of Emily's tiny hand. The bite gave way to a humming buzz that raced up Sam's arm and flowed back down into Emily's.
That contact derailed Emily's nightmare and her body went limp as reality formed back around her. For a few seconds there was only the sound of both Emily and Sam gasping in hard gulps of air as the shock of the circuit between them ebbed back and forth. It was stronger this time, more intense than the other times when Sam had held her palm lightly against his, hoping that he'd find the power had melted away into nothing. The currents braided together between them, welding their hands like some magnet on steroids.
Sam heard the faint sound of more glass breaking and then darkness falling around them as the huge halogen light outside broke into a million crystals and showered down into the front yard. It was hot where their hands were clasped together and Emily's body went even more slack against his chest. Sam's head fell back against the wall and a dull ache began to take over his skull. But there was something different this time, some other residual wave of energy that wasn't Sam and wasn't Emily. It was like the scent left behind after someone with strong perfume had left the room. A echo of something that didn't belong and had damn sure not been in their contact before tonight.
Then it was gone.
Bobby's rough hands had pulled theirs apart and he crouched on the floor in front of them, his face haggard and pale. Emily snapped back into reality, her dream terror gone and replaced by real pain and confusion. Now she was crying those terrible hiccupping sobs as Bobby examined her hands and knees and Sam struggled to get them into a more upright position.
"My God, what happened in here, Sam?" Bobby was helping him to stand and hold onto Emily at the same time. Emily's body was a hot, sweaty bundle in his arms and she twisted quickly against his chest, soaking his t-shirt as she wept.
"Nightmare. Bad one." Sam didn't spare too many words for Bobby, preferring to rock Emily and whisper down over her head. "It's over, sweetie. Shhhh, I gotcha'."
"Want my daddy." Her other bloody hand wriggled under Sam's sleeve, searching for a comforting mark that he just didn't have.
"It's okay, Emily. He'll be here soon." Sam was struck by how fragile she was in his arms, like she weighed less than a bird, less than a scrap of paper, but when she'd been fighting for her life in the middle of a nightmare she'd been so hard to handle. She sobbed hard against his shirt, no amount of soothing slowing it down.
Sam lost track of how long he held her there in the dark, crooning nonsense phrases against her hair and failing to relax her. At this rate, she was going to make herself sick by the way her belly strained with the nonstop sobbing.
"He-didn't-come-he-didn't-come."
"Dean will be here soon, sweetie. I promise."
"Grandpa John-said-he-would-come-doesn't-love-me-anymore-let-monster-get-me."
She broke each word apart with sharp gasps of air between talking and crying and all Sam could do was stroke her back and try to comfort her.
"It was just a dream, Emily. It's okay. Please don't cry."
Bobby was back. He'd shoved an old rocking chair into the room and was setting up a new lamp beside it to give them some light. After Sam had folded them both into the chair, Bobby set to work with the first aid kit, pulling pieces of glass from Emily's hands and knees with tweezers. Her crying never changed, just stayed that steady, heartbreaking rhythm broken only by requests for her Daddy and nearly incoherent ramblings about why her new hero grandfather hadn't fought off the monster in her head tonight.
"Wonder what brought this on? She was doing so good the last few days." Bobby had applied the bandages Emily needed and shifted to Sam, treating his injured hand and cheek with as much care as he had the traumatized four-year-old shaking in Sam's lap.
"You need to call Dean." Sam whispered it, holding one large hand over Emily's ear to keep the sound of her father's name from setting her off again.
Bobby was swabbing the last of the blood off of Sam's skin then catching a stray trail of red he'd missed smeared down Emily's leg. "Okay, I'll go do that now." He simply got to his feet and left, not commenting on the exploding light fixtures or how he'd had to pry their hands apart. Bobby knew this was too big for right now and would keep for later and Sam was thankful for the man's ability to keep quiet when quiet was what was needed.
After Bobby disappeared into the hallway to call Dean, Sam just kept rocking Emily back and forth, trying to comfort her, trying to make her believe everything was going to be okay in the morning. But it was going to be the same in the morning. Her mother was still going to be dead. A monster was still going to be buried in her memory, burning her flesh over and over again. There was nothing that could undo that, nothing that could box that up and ship it away.
Emily let out a sob so thick it was nearly a groan against his chest and he tried to snuggle her up higher so he could kiss her forehead and apologize for having to send some psychic jolt into her to wake her up.
"Shhh, sweetheart. Try to breathe slower. It'll feel better if you just try to relax. Your Daddy's on the way and I'm not letting you go until he gets here."
"Why didn't Grandpa John help me?" It was a pathetic whimpered question that he didn't have an answer for at the moment.
Dean was going to be pissed. Pissed at himself for not being here. Pissed at Sam for the whole electric-shining-whammy he'd used to snap Emily out of it. But most of all, he was going to be pissed that he'd been right all along. Somebody or something was screwing around with Emily's head at night and had decided tonight was the perfect night to throw her to the wolves.
Sam couldn't worry about Dean's reaction now. Now, all he could do was keep rocking.
TBC
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