**See the last fifteen chapter.
The dream world seemed to take longer to fade in… perhaps it was flickering, in and out, in and out, the ins getting longer and the outs getting shorter each time, until the in finally didn't stop.
It was dizzy, blurry, unclear… colors, blobs, shapes, nothing real… Ginny could hear her own breathing; slow hyperventilation; in and out, in and out, like the way the dream world and the darkness had been fading in and out, yet neither was longer or shorter then the other now. Even.
She waited, silent except for the deep intake and outtake of breaths, gray eyes starring out beyond black lashes and a pale face, and the haziness began to dissipate…
There was Freddy, as always. He stood about four or five yards away from her, his back to her, his arms crossed unhappily over his chest, his head arched down darkly to stare at the ground, the dirty old fedora looking black under the dim light of the boiler room.
Ginny clumsily stood up, feeling weak and numb, weighed down. Why did Freddy look so displeased? Didn't he know what night it was? He had to know! This was what he'd been waiting for… he'd been waiting for this for almost twenty years… the dream demon Freddy Krueger, waiting for his lost power to come back to daddy.
"Freddy," Ginny called out, quietly, taking a step towards him. He didn't respond. She took another step. "Freddy?"
His head rose. Ginny stopped dead in her tracks. The Nightmare Man looked over his shoulder, regarding her only with a cold stare for a long moment, before muttering: "Gabe…"
"I…" she faltered. What could she say? "… I–"
"Don't say anything," he grumbled. "I already know."
Again, she paused… then took another shaky step towards him… and another… and another. "Then why…"
His eyes grew wide, almost perfect circles, and it seemed that they were speaking without words, almost, some sort of dark connection between the killer and his completely opposite counterpart.
Finally, she was in front of him. He turned around fully to face her, keeping his arms wrapped sternly around himself. She stood before him, nothing but a misunderstood little blonde girl trapped in something so much bigger then her, and yet she looked up at his as a child would their father, looking up with such trust and such admiration, knowing or believe, at least, that he knew all the answers to any little question life could ask… anyone looking could read her like a book… and yet he stood there, trying to hide anything he could think or feel from anyone, for his unsurity was confusing in this time of need.
"What do we do now?" Ginny whispered. "How do you take it from me? When is it time? How do we know when it's time? How does it work? How… how…"
Freddy looked down at her, frowning. "… You'll know when it's time."
"How?" Ginny repeated.
Freddy sneered and turned away again. "Why the FUCK is it that you always have to ask so many goddamn questions?"
Ginny recoiled, shocked by Freddy's sudden outburst… she would have expected him to be overjoyed to see that the time had finally come… was something wrong? Had she done something wrong? The bottle of pills she swallowed appeared in her mind… could it have something to do with that?
He stood motionless, back to her, just as he'd stood when she first came into his dream world on this night… there was a long pause… Ginny frowned, took a step closer to him, set a hand on his shoulder, and began to speak… but just as she opened her mouth, the boiler room roared to life.
Steam whistled loudly out of pipes, and all the pipes themselves began to hiss, there was the sound of banging metal from a crossed the boiler room, the clicking of a thermometer measuring how hot the stream was, and a clock on the wall began chiming loudly… it was the clock that would usual ring when it's time for lunch break or to go home.
Ginny felt a pang of terror hit her heart. What was going on? She had no idea… in all the nights she had spent in Freddy's playground; this had never happened before. What did it mean? She turned wide, frightened eyes on Freddy. He didn't respond, of course… he just waited for all the noise to die down.
When it did, there was yet another pause between the two… the living girl and the dead man… before he whispered: "It's time, Gabe."
Ginny looked back at Freddy. "Huh?"
"One hour before midnight," Freddy said. "It can only be taken one hour before midnight… any time during that hour."
"So… how do we take it?"
"It doesn't matter," Freddy grunted, miserably, turning away from her and striding a few steps down the metal mesh walkways. "I'm not taking it…"
"What?" Ginny shrieked in shock.
"I'm not taking it," Freddy repeated, anger lacing his guttural voice.
"Why not?"
Freddy turned, half way, and his mouthed curled up in a sneer… he was looking at her in disgust. "You know, for the One with all the power, you really are a fucking idiot!"
Ginny frowned, but stood up straight. "Answer me, Krueger."
Freddy raised a brow, surprised that she would speak sternly to him… but that didn't alter his look of disgust. His anger. Bitterness. "You wanna know how I'm supposed to extract the power? I'm supposed to kill you. Yeah, that's right; kill you to take it from you… you wanna know why? Because it's all you are! You're nothing! A ghost! A shell! A container to hold my leftovers! I gotta kill you to take 'em back 'cause I gotta destroy the shell to get to the power it holds. You get it now? Huh?"
Ginny paused. She felt her eyes burning, tears desperate to escape, escaping her no matter how hard she tried to hold them back, as if they had a mind of their own… but not real. Not real tears… designed only to imitate human tears… but not the tears of a human… the tears of a things. A ghost.
"So why are you holding back?" Ginny's voice shook, softly, no matter how hard she tried to make it not. Her hands balled into tight fists, nails' cutting into the palms, but the pain was fake… everything was faked… only to imitate humans.
"You got a good point there," Freddy scoffed. "Usually, this would be nothin'… I'm a killer – the Springwood Slasher – I like killing," now he seemed to be talking more to himself then to Ginny, as crazy men often do. "So why is it I don't wanna kill you? Why, huh? It doesn't make any sense… but no… I like you… I actually like somebody… how sick is that? Well, if I have to like somebody, at least they can be me… and you are me, as I said, you're a container for my power. An extension of me… like a daughter."
Katherine… Ginny remembered the name of his daughter. He'd compared her with his daughter before… she remembered… was that what this was about? Did he see his daughter in her? Or did he long just to have something like what he'd had with Katherine again? Was that what Ginny was to him?
Yes…
But Ginny was ripped from her thoughts by the light… she gasped and looked down at her chest… there was a red colored glowing, as if someone was shinning a red lights unto her skin, right over her heart, from inside… it was about the shape of her heart, too… as if her heart were glowing.
"For the Blood is the Life…" Freddy whispered the old quote. Ginny looked up at him, confused. "It's in the blood. The power is in the blood. For the Blood is the Life. The blood is the life and the strength… the power is in the blood."
Ginny's mouth hung slightly agar but she did not say anything. She just looked at him, wide-eyed.
"You know, you'd have to die to destroy me, too, Gabby Pet… just thought I'd warn you incase you decided to fuck me over again."
Again? She'd never "fucked him over" before… he was talking about Katherine again, wasn't he?
She could feel… she was feeling fear, confusion, pain, sadness, anger, love, all balled together in one horrible mass… all because of him… all because he was the center of her world… because she was him, part of him, nothing more… all of her emotions, so real, but they were fake… all fake.
Though there was something breaking through them… something that was definitely real… a sense of need, a sense of duty, a sense of purpose, and perhaps belonging.
She knew everything, now… and this was the last moment. This was what needed to be done, what she was made for, the last dance, and the last battle, where everything would come together and be settled, where the world could work out, where all would be right and finished, where, afterwards, she could rest.
"Freddy, it's time," she said sharply. "Forget this, forget everything, you have to take it, you have to do it, I want you to, I'm giving it to you, everyone dies someday, now is just my time, take it, Freddy, it's yours, it belongs to you, take the power and release me from the pressure of carrying it, embrace your homicidal nature and take it, Freddy, it's time to finish this."
"What?" Freddy cried, startled.
"It's yours; take it."
"No!"
"Take it!" She got right up in his faced, grabbing his clawed hand and placed it palm-down to her chest above her heart. "You can feel that, I know you can feel that, blood, pumping, alive, the power is in there, it's yours, give into it, embrace it, it's what you've always wanted, it was stolen from you, take it back."
Freddy's lips curled back in a look of pure disgust, his eyebrows lowering on his eyes, sharp and clear as knives they were.
"Fuck you," he yanked his hand away, then brought it back around and hit her… hard. She went flying to the floor and tumbling rapidly until she hit and was stopped on a rail on the mesh walkway.
He looked at her, but didn't say anything or move. His expression had fell and was now blank. He watched her; huddled in a corner, lay still for a long time.
But she would not give up there. She stirred, forced herself up to a sitting position, then to her hands and knees, then she groped for the top of the railing, found it, used it to help her up to her feet. Freddy shook his head. She began to walk towards him again. This was going too far… too far.
"Take it," she repeated. "It belongs to you, you fucking bastard, take it!"
Anger boiling in his chest… anger, hotter then the water in the boilers… he felt the rage, growing homicidal.
"TAKE IT!" she screamed in his face… and he felt the rage boiler over… like it had that night when she'd told him that Jeanie had told her about destroying him… but farther this time… much farther.
He drew his claws back, the rage guiding them, overtaking him, and he saw it before it happened, as he often did when the rage controlled the kill rather then him… he brought his arm back, flexing out the claws, they flashed dangerously, then he brought his arm back around very quickly, the finger nail knives posed forward, slamming into her chest, breaking the skin, going straight into the heart, sucking up the power… but it really happened.
His claws crashed through… and the rage melted rapidly.
He looked upon them in shock for a long moment, terrible feeling taking him over so strong that he could not control the moan that escaped his lips: "Oh no…"
Blood began to slip out around his claws, coating them. He felt it going into him but he did not care, did not care in the slightest. He looked up at her face. Her eyes were wide and dimming rapidly. They were already starring out blindly. Her mouth was moving but all that was coming out was these pathetically short gasping sounds. A little line of blood escaped the corner of her mouth a trickled down her chin.
He watched her in disbelief… watched, as the gasps slowly, or rapidly, got shallower until they stopped. They stopped.
"Gabe…" he breathed… but the word was barely said. She didn't respond in the slightest. He said it a little louder… and then a little louder. "Gabe… Gabe?"
… Still no response.
Dead.
He didn't know whether he was sorrowful or anger… this was not a feeling… this wasn't real… but it was real.
The body slowly slipped off his claws, crumbling into a heap on the floor and a pool of blood began on the floor, trickling out the gaps in the mesh.
He looked upon, watching it, haunted, disbelieving. Real, not real, awake, a dream, fantasy, nonfiction, there was no difference between them… nothing… just.
He waited for the body to start to disappear… after he killed them; there dream selves always disappeared… everyone he'd ever killed… because they no longer had dream selves… just bodies… just carcasses left behind… but hers did not… it could not… because she had been part of him, so she had a completely different soul in the dream world, just like he did.
He turned away, unable to look at it anymore.
… This was the end… but a new beginning…
He had the power… but it seemed worthless, now… empty. Empty without his only friend… they all fall down… everyone he will ever love… they will all fall down.
As if to mock him, the ghost girls appeared… a few of his first victims… three little girls… he knew them all by name. They had there hands laced together and were spinning around in a circle in the middle of the platform just down the mesh hallway from him… they were singing.
"Ring around the rosy… pocket full of posy… ashes, ashes… we all fall down."
They dropped to the ground on their bums and began to laugh, all three, chuckling at odds with each other.
"Oh go to Hell you fuckin' cunts!" he shouted at them… but they didn't stop laughing… they would never stop laughing… laughing with the joy of seeing their murderer feeling low, horrible, as if his life had been taken, just like he'd taken theirs.
… For now…
THE END