Title: Fearless

Rating: M for Language, Violence, Grotesquerie, and General Trippiness

Summary: A girl suffers trauma to her temporal lobe. The result: no fear. ~ Uh, I guess you don't have to squint for romance anymore. 1000 words per drabble.

Disclaimer & Important Notes: Don't own Freddy; don't own the rhymes. You know the drill.

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Faulty

(Night 98)

Ash didn't always dream herself into Freddy's world. Most of the time, yes—even powernaps could take her to the periphery of his landscape—but not always. These other fragmented dreams were unimportant to her. She usually forgot them.

But Freddy watched. From the hazy edges, he stared in, trying to learn things about her, trying to piece together her fears.

There was a brother. There was a woman—the mother, he recognized from his trip through Ash's brain, the mother who crashed the car, the mother who put her out of my reach—but the woman was gone all the time, working, and had no fucking imagination anyway. Even if Freddy managed to creep into her dreams, he'd probably have to kill her with her own monotony.

No wonder Ash was always bored out of her skull.

But she wasn't just bored, he realized slowly. She was lonely. He marveled that he hadn't seen it before—when she's with you, she isn't fucking alone, is she?—but there it was, plain as day. Bitch like her…couldn't be scared, couldn't be angry. Couldn't daydream with other girls about the butterflies in her stomach when some punk walked into the room. She had friends, kind of—the ones he'd left alive before she'd come traipsing through his dreamscape, anyway—but there was an infinite amount they couldn't share. Most hens, Freddy thought, spent all their time giggling over boys or bitching about something anyway, and Ash was given to neither behavior.

He wondered if even she knew how fucking lonely she was, the sadness that crept into her solemn eyes. He wondered if she ever noticed that when she dreamed, no-one else was in them with her; at least, no-one else was speaking to her, acknowledging her. Then he wondered if she remembered any but the ones she shared with him.

He sat at his workbench, watching her dreams on an old 14-inch television while he sharpened his blades. He debated using what he'd seen to hurt her. He couldn't frighten her, of course, but Freddy knew better than anyone else that there was more than one way to skin a cat.

He could bring her low. She was on a pedestal as it was, so fucking high above him—he skillfully ignored the fact that it was he himself who had put her there—and it could be fun, to bring her down to his level. Put her in her place. Which was beneath him, incidentally.

Twisting and moaning.

He could mock her. Cut her open with his words. He could design elaborate dreamscapes in which she would come face-to-face with her own keening loneliness and recognize it for what it was: debilitating, crippling.

He spent hours contemplating it, even after she woke up. Crafting it, a hundred different ways. And the next night, when she came back. And the next. For a whole week, in fact. Yeah, there was more than one way to skin a cat.

Five-hundred and ninety-six ways, as a matter of fact.

And yet not one seemed, well, satisfying.

My Bonnie lies over the ocean,
My Bonnie lies over the sea;
My Bonnie lies over the ocean:
Oh bring back my Bonnie to me.

Last night as I lay on my pillow,
Last night as I lay on my bed;
Last night as I lay on my pillow:
I dreamed that my Bonnie was dead.

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This drabble is dedicated to Alison for the prompt, "Faulty," as in, Freddy's logic is.

It is 514 words long.

Another prompt that would have been fitting for this drabble would be "Fixation," but I didn't think of that till after the fact and the original inspiration was Alison's prompt. It was a fun one, for sure! Please consider Freddy as one of those marshmallows that kids let catch on fire when they're making s'mores. Charred and ashy on the outside, but squishy on the inside. (Yeah, yeah, it's a fitting a simile. And I like to think I don't make him TOO squishy.) As I said before, they're BFFs and don't even know it.

Thanks again for the prompt, Alison! More will be coming soon!