His dream starts out normally enough; sitting in class, riding his horse, paddling a canoe when he was seven, all manner of assorted memories, arranged in a vague and nonsensical order that the foggy haze of unconsciousness convinces him makes sense.
But before long, the placid montage takes a darker turn. Painful memories, ones that hurt to think about, that make his heart catch in his chest when they pass through his mind.
It starts with the dance, the instant that everything had started to go wrong, then the siege, then a moment of hope that's quickly crushed by a tank plowing through the gate.
Running through the halls, desperate to stop what had already started. Brian pushing him aside before he could make it into the room.
Brian's body, bleeding out on the floor.
Brian's body, limp in his arms as he carried him from what was left of their school.
The memories end there, but the dream doesn't. In his dream, he's still carrying Brian, far past the point where he'd finally been convinced to let go.
In his dream, Brian stirs in his arms, sitting up and staring at him with cold, blank eyes. Brian opens his mouth, revealing sharp teeth and a discolored tongue, but says nothing before twisting his mouth into a cruel smile. He winks at Alex, once, and then his skin goes gray, then starts to fall off, melting away like a wax candle until Alex is left holding a skeleton, a puddle of bubbling flesh on the ground beneath him.
Alex wakes to the sound of his own scream, one hand clutching at his chest as he struggles to catch his breath.
In the back of his throat he can still taste the phantom smell of burning skin, and he barely makes it to the trash bin before throwing up.
I'm sorry, he thinks, the image of Brian's bloodied and broken corpse burned in his mind as he grips the edge of the bin, I'm so sorry.