Jason

He never dreams.

Someone told him, once, that everyone dreams. Maybe that was true. But, he'd long ago grown used to being different from 'everyone'. Whoever everyone was. It never used to bother him, the absence of dreams. Seemed like just another thing that didn't matter that people spent too much time worrying about.

Robin used to ask him about his dreams, her fingers twined in his, head centered precisely on his chest as if she needed to hear his heart beating. She never seemed satisfied with his noncommittal answers, his assertion that he didn't dream. She didn't say anything, but he'd become adept, by then, in reading the quality of Robin's silences. Later, towards the end, he'd begun to tell her small things when she asked. The same kinds of things she'd tell him she dreamed of. The things he feared, the things he wanted. He answered the questions she wasn't asking when she asked him what he'd dreamed.

Funny. He'd always thought it was Carly who'd taught him to lie.

Lately, he'd begun wondering. If he did dream, what images floated beneath his eyelids in the dark of night? Whose face did he see when he closed his eyes? It made his head hurt, wondering that. But, he couldn't seem to stop. Laying in another bed in whatever town he'd landed in, his last thought before waking was 'who will I lose tonight?'

So many nights, so many different beds. Most of them alone. All of them lonely. None of them home. He'd said something, once, to Sonny about needing to be the one who left. He'd meant it then; he still meant it now. He just hadn't known, then, the thing you don't know until you leave. Once you're gone, the world doesn't stop. People go on; they move on. And, when you come home again, home isn't the place you left.

Maybe that's why he's started trying to gain back those hours lost to sleep. Those mornings, when Robin used to talk about dreams, she'd tell him about hers. Sometimes they were about things she wanted and didn't have yet -- a baby, a medical career, a house in Paris. Sometimes they were about the things that scared her -- dying, being alone, rats. But, mostly, they were about a time when things were easier, when she understood her life. Robin dreamed of them when they'd been new, she dreamed of Stone before he got sick, of her parents alive and strong. When Robin slept, she dreamed herself a world where she was happy.

He wonders what world he'd dream himself. Who would live in it? As he lies in small twin beds, alone, neon signs and full moons and illuminated pyramids shining outside his window in turn, he wonders why he doesn't know the answer to that question.

He never dreams. But he wishes he could.