Title: Fearless
Rating: M for Language, Violence, Grotesquerie, and General Trippiness
Summary: A girl suffers trauma to her temporal lobe. The result: no fear. ~ Squint and turn the screen sideways for romantic subtext. 1000 words per drabble.
Disclaimer & Important Notes:
I don't own Freddy. I don't want to own Freddy. He's a bad, bad man. I do not own Elm Street, either, though once I stole a sign.
None of the poems in this piece are mine. They are a collection of Mother Goose nursery rhymes, poems from children's books and stories, and songs passed down through generations of children and parents to acquaintances who were kind enough to let me use them.
Entry Seven, Night Twenty: Fatality
Word Count: 809--was 689, still under my 700 goal, but I had to add more. Silly! I hope I didn't ruin the flow!
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Fatality
Night 20
Damaged--maybe. She'd only stared at him blankly, though he figured she was incapable of fear, not pain. But fuck, "damaged" was a fucking compliment, coming from Freddy Krueger.
She was sitting on his workbench again, and he was pretending to mess with his glove so he wouldn't have to look at her swinging legs. He figured he could still hurt her if he wanted—there were ways to do that in spite of her startling lack of fear. Physically—as physically as it got in the dream world, anyway—he could still overpower her. Still attack her other mental faculties. He couldn't kill her, maybe—couldn't make her fear him—but he could make her feel dirty. Use her. Make the dreams aversive to her, distasteful instead of...what had she referred to them as? Oh, yeah.
Interesting.
He'd thought about it a few times, lately.
He hadn't offered her more than grunts and sneers in the last few nights. No words. He'd wondered if he could damage her in other ways, make her cry by cutting not at her body but whatever emotions she had left. Now, his mind made up--it couldn't hurt to try, could it? And Freddy was nothing if not inventive, a real risk-taker--he turned and leaned against the table and met her eyes, giving her his best burning glare. He knew his eyes were glowing in the charred folds of his face.
"No fear, huh?" he jeered. "That's gotta be a rush. You're all-powerful."
She blinked at his sudden eloquence, then shrugged. "More the opposite," she offered dryly. "Nothing inside me ever tells me no."
The thought was amusing. He snorted. "Nothing ever tells me no, either. That's why I can do what I do--and love it." He grinned lasciviously. "People like that--we're animals. Killers, all of us." He leaned back. He hoped the dumb slut knew what he was implying. Hoped she was disturbed by it. He didn't generally like to play such delicate games, but if it was the only way to break her... "So why aren't you?" he asked, studying her face with a sneer. "No fear? You should be out killing. Or stealing. Or fucking your brains out."
She wasn't, he knew. He hadn't seen another man but him in her dreams, not even faint traces.
She shrugged. "I used to. Less the killing and fucking part...mostly. I've been bungee-jumping. Skydiving. I threw myself out of my dad's truck on the freeway once, ran my own car off of an overpass. Opened my femoral artery in a bathrub. Put my hand on a stove burner to see if I could."
He didn't stare at her. He left his eyes hooded and opaque, to better hide his surprise. M
She caught his eye and looked at him blankly when he didn't have some snickering or degrading comment. It took a minute for her to understand why.
"I mean, I got over it," she said, and shrugged. "I can still make, like, cognitive choices. Am I afraid of death? No. Do I want to die? Not particularly. It takes me longer to process than other people because it's not instinctual, and I have to think: is this something I should be doing?" She was watching him carefully, and he realized suddenly that it was a challenge for her to interpret his expression. Not just because of his omnipresent sneer--or his dashing good looks--but simply because there was a barrier between what other people felt and what she was capable of feeling.
Habit, then, he figured, though he imagined he was much further along on the sociopath scale than she was.
"It wasn't a power-high, though," she continued after a minute, as though she had finally sorted out what he was thinking. "Not like you're imagining. Everything in the world feels—so dull now. Colorless. I don't feel fear—but I remember what it feels like." She nodded her head once, firmly. "People get jealous," she said, and chuckled softly. "Can you imagine? No test anxiety. No fear of failure. I give the best speeches, the best interviews. I can ask any boy out without worrying about rejection." She hesitated. "But I remember—at least a little—what it was like to ride a roller coaster, and I don't ever feel that way anymore. I don't jump when a friend plays a prank on me, and I don't have any instinct to run when I'm cornered by a demon with claws on his hand." She smiled a little at him, hesitantly though—vaguely puzzled, like she'd lost something and didn't know what it was. "I don't get butterflies when I meet a guy I'm attracted to anymore."
A shrug, and a smile. "Really, you know…when it comes down to it, Freddy, you're more alive than I am."
Oranges and lemons, say the Bells of St. Clement's
You owe me five farthings, say the Bells of St. Martin's
When will you pay me? say the Bells of Old Bailey
When I grow rich, say the Bells of Shoreditch
When will that be? say the Bells of Stepney
I do not know, say the Great Bells of Bow
Here comes a candle to light you to bed
And here comes a chopper to chop off your Head!
Chip chop chip chop—the Last Man's Dead.
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