A/N: {Blood trigger warning}
"Do not ignore dreams. They are a line from the past to the future. All nightmares are real."
~Max Gladstone
At some point later that night, Avery managed to stumble her way back down the fire escape and topple into her bed. She was out almost instantly when she hit the pillows. She didn't even bother to pull the covers up.
It wasn't long before her fitful, restless sleep gave way to a dream.
In the dream, she stood in a vast, green field. It was deathly still. No wind blew, no grass rustled. She was blind and deaf to everything but the perfect expanse of night sky above her, swirling and glittering like a Van Gogh painting.
The stars and moon were unobstructed by any clouds, and seemed to give off a gentle, warm glow. Thousands upon thousands of her familiar starry friends laughed down at her from the heavens. To Avery, they seemed much closer than normal. Close enough to touch.
When this thought formed, she reached out toward the star that shone the brightest. As she stretched toward it, it grew brighter, so that it eventually emitted more light than the silvery moon on her left.
Reality warped around her. Suddenly, the star was close enough to touch, even though her feet remained firmly planted on the ground.
She faltered. Not only was the star almost blindingly bright, but it pulsed with a heat that was noticeably different from the others.
Avery couldn't stop herself. Fingers splayed, she rested her hand on the center of the star.
All at once, the warm, white light leeched out of the star, and it turned a blazing, violent red. The gentle heat was gone. Where it had once been, a bone-chilling cold sapped the warmth from Avery's hand.
She recoiled and fell back, landing on her rear.
The star was growing bigger, angrier, brighter. It advanced on her like it was alive.
And like it meant to kill her.
Everything was bathed in its jarring red light. She scrambled backwards in a blind panic, trying to escape, when she realized with a jolt that the ground was wet.
She glanced down and saw that her hands and her clothes were soaked with blood. It seeped up from the ground on all sides.
The star kept coming, burning her into the ground with its merciless wrath.
The earth beneath her began to tremble. The distant rumbling turned into shaking so violent that Avery thought she might be sick. Blood kept leaking up from the ground.
Out of nowhere, a mind-numbing CRACK split the air, and the earth broke open in an enormous fissure.
The fissure divided and grew, hairline fractures multiplying and snaking over the earth like long, spindly fingers.
The fissures raced toward Avery. Her legs dropped out from under her as a crack yawned and she fell into the earth, screaming. The star above her regarded her icily before slipping back into the sky.
It wasn't over. Instead of hitting the ground or burning up in the lava of the earth's crust, Avery smacked into a wall of water at the bottom of the gaping crevasse.
Except, she realized, it wasn't water.
The liquid was red and thick.
She flailed and kicked, but an unseen force pulled her down, down, down into the endless sea of blood. It was hot and sticky as it choked her, filling her nose and ears and mouth. She opened her mouth to scream, but the salty, metallic liquid rushed in and silenced her.
She was drowning.
She was drowning.
She was-
She snapped up in bed, gasping, as she ripped the covers off of her in a knee-jerk reaction. Her eyes darted back and forth for a few moments before coming to rest on the computer, the window, the bed.
It had just been a dream.
No.
A nightmare.
She sat still, trying to catch her breath and come back to reality. She didn't often have dreams that were so real, but this one-
Avery shuddered. Looking at the window again, she noticed that she had beaten the sunrise. The clock read 4:13 a.m.
She groaned inwardly, realizing she must have only gotten around an hour of sleep.
She was so unnerved by the nightmare that going back to sleep was out of the question. As quietly as she could, she shifted off the bed and got to her feet. Once out of the covers, she felt her clothes sticking to her. She had sweated clean through them.
Some part of her hoped that she hadn't been making noise as she dreamt. Every time her parents and her had to share a hotel room, they always mocked her for how she talked in her sleep.
Wincing in discomfort at her damp t-shirt and shorts, she peeled them off, slipped into the shower, and rubbed herself briskly with a towel, but not without tripping in the dark a few times. After no small amount of fumbling around, she went down to the kitchen to make some tea. She dumped almost a quarter of a bottle of honey in the mug, desperately needing to be jolted awake.
Her frequent encounters with danger were not good for her mental health, she decided as she eased onto the living room couch in the dark. Noting the scratchy plaid throw muddled on the corner of the couch, she pulled it onto her, shivering in the cold of the empty room. She grasped her tea mug with both hands, trying not to let its warmth remind her of the red star.
If the dream had left her with anything, it was a tingling premonition that the Winter Soldier wasn't done with her yet.