"Dammit, Lucrecia, he's waking up! I told you that absolute sedation is essential for the process!"
"Don't worry about it, darling...he's so doped up, to him it will only be a..."
The Valentine Chronicles
"Vincent's Dream" (Intermezzo)
It started, as some confusing dreams do, with a waking.
oh my God I'm strapped to this table what's happening to me help me help
It was sunset. It was Costa Del Sol. It was Lucrecia.
He lay upon the powdery sand and drank her vision in like the cleanest and coolest of water. Her visage was balm and bliss, it was somehow more of a feeling than a collection of features – details like eyes, mouth, hair...such things were inconsequential. She was salvation.
"I love you," he said simply.
She smiled, oh that smile, that wonderful (carnal) smile, running a finger down his arm to rest lightly upon his hand (a claw it's a claw what the hell am I).
"Of course you do," she breathed, and she was right. Lucrecia was always right. His love for her had eclipsed morality and emotion. It was simply essential. He loved her with the same mindless absoluteness that inspired all his other bodily functions. He loved her to live as he breathed to live, and as his very cells tore themselves to pieces in order to rebuild his body (better faster stronger damned) so too did each new cell desire her more. He loved her as he loved death.
He longed to go to her, to envelop himself in her, but alas...it was a dream, and the laws of reality do not necessarily apply to dreams. He felt overcome with the paralysis of his feeling for her (eighty tons of resistance on those shackles, boy, just try your luck) and could do nothing. So he spoke.
"You weren't wearing white."
She fingered the hem of her pearly white (labcoat) dress and laughed. "No, I suppose I wasn't."
"You were wearing a green dress. I told you that it matched your eyes and you said it couldn't, because your eyes were the color of life, and no dressmaker was that talented. Then we went into town and had lobster for dinner and you made me let you pay because you said your salary was ten times mine and..." Vincent trailed off as his world started to reel (200 milligrams ought to do it, nice and easy...) and everything seemed to rotate ninety degrees. The sand, the surf, and the water became reality's wall, he gazed down beseechingly upon a floor which was only the horizon. Only some sort of improbable, dreamy physics kept Vincent from falling, falling, falling forever.
Vincent wished he could.
But there was still Lucrecia...still the light at the end of the tunnel. If only, he thought dreamily, he knew what color that light was...
He was impossibly tired.
"Vincent..." her voice floated through the world, "...you're doing so well. My Vincent."
He gazed at her as the world abstracted, as the sky spouted machinery, chemical tanks, test tubes. The sun rose swiftly, became a spotlight. Everywhere, the pale yellow of sand and sun became a sickly green.
His voice was fuzzy,
coming as a muddled grumble.
"Did you ever love me?"
She
stared at him, eagerly, hungrily. "Vincent..."
"...I love you more now than I ever have before. My sweet Vincent. Look at what you've done for me." Her next words were directed to the faceless man who, Vincent realized, had somehow been standing there the whole time.
"Put him under."
(oh no you don't you bitch you wonderful terrible bitch you won't get away so easy NOW YOU WILL LISTEN TO ME)
I blinked my yellow eyes, concentrating what remained of my vocal chords on providing coherent speech.
"You damn yourself as you damn me."
And then the dream was over...a dream which, like so many, would go unremembered the next morning.
(goodnight, Vincent, goodbye)
I woke up before sunrise the next morning, feeling strangely unrefreshed. Not that it really mattered, but it still kind of irritated me. The moon was still out, tinged faintly green.
I packed camp and stowed away all but the essentials. As always, I went through my morning routine, teeth brushed, face washed, guns oiled and loaded. Then I headed west.
There was death in the air. There was killing to be done.
Author's Note: Another long update, sorry about that. Hope you all enjoyed, as always, read and review!
