Just once, Roy would like to see him sleep without nightmares.

Without the crushed brow and mouth opening and closing like a dying fisherman caught in an unexpected squall. Without the long tresses of hair caught and covered in spittle at the corners of his lips. Without the movement of his arms and legs, without giving Roy bruises that he would feel guilty about later. He mumbles things, lets out little whimpers and noises of sheer terror and they surprise Roy every time they happen because it amazes him that someone like him who has witnessed and done so much can become a prisoner of his own mind. His own torture victim.

Roy amends that thought quickly. It's most likely because he's witnessed and done so much that the nightmares come.

The covers crumple easily under his wretched grip as he thrashes against the soft silken sheets, beads of sweat at his brow and dribbling down to give the material that disgusting feel that it gets when it's wet and clings to a person with static charge and surface tension. His teeth gnash at his lips, sometimes so hard that he makes them bleed by accident and Roy desperately tries to get close enough to kiss the blood away. He throws himself violently against the sheets like a bucking horse trying to free itself from both harness and rider and Roy has to step back lest he receive a painful and totally unintentional blow.

Sometimes, he moans and says words in his sleep. Sometimes they're disjointed gibberish, singular words or names or just strangled cries, but Roy has heard the sentences as well, the speak of darkness coming to swallow him whole, of slitted purple eyes peering out of the gloom and ready to punish him at any given time and of the screams of thousands of dead men fused together to make a blood red stone.

And the strangest of all was the little girl standing at the window as the world around her burned.

Roy wishes he wouldn't have nightmares.

Roy wishes that Ling had never experienced the events in the first place.

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A/n: HAHAHAHA I GOT YOU ALL!

Okay, so I probably didn't, but I bet the majority of you thought this was going to be RoyEd, didn't you? DIDN'T YOU!

Okay. I'm over it now. Now to actually get back to writing AWWA. -looks over at the half-typed chapter guiltily-

Read and review? -tin rattle-