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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Fissure
(Night 105)
Sometimes there were cracks in the foundation of the dreamworld, and Freddy could peer through. Little spiderwebbing fractures in the walls, where people who were awake got lost in thought, or daydreamed. Typically, in the past, he would hunt out the offspring of his murderers, or fresh piggies who were prime candidates for fear, or the children who knew his story. He'd chip away at the chinks, feeding their fear.
Now he had an annoying tendency to only look for Ash.
He hated it.
But just the night before, he'd turned around abruptly, only to find her fingers half-reaching for his face. He'd held very still. He'd briefly contemplated biting her fingers off, but it would be a wasted effort, wouldn't it? Besides, the prospect seemed much less…fun, anymore.
She'd apparently taken his stillness as permission, because her cool fingers had skated lightly over the crevices and cracks in his skin. He was motionless.
"Do they hurt?" she'd asked.
He'd licked his mangled lips and had said nothing. He didn't know what to say, how to respond in a way that was suitably scornful and vicious.
"My head aches sometimes," she admitted, and briefly touched the side of her skull with her other hand. He had seen, once, the hidden scar that ran across the side of her head, a thin stripe of naked flesh where no hair grew, delicately indented. "And when we crashed, glass from the window cut my cheek.I didn't move my face for days so it could heal. And it did—just fine, you can't even hardly see the scar unless you stare—but it was what came after that hurt worse. Trying to break up the scar tissue. It hurts so badly. You…" And she trailed off, but her fingers never left the side of his face. Her eyes never left him either. "Does it hurt?" she asked again, her voice a pale whisper.
He almost said, Yes. He almost said, All the time. But he didn't want to, didn't want to say anything, so he shot her a disgusted glare and pulled away.
But the crevices in the dreamworld, and the crevice in her skull, and the folded crevices of his scarred face were still nothing compared to the bright fractures that lanced through him at her words, during this precise moment, and a dozen other moments gone before.
Little Miss Muffet
Sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey;
Along came a spider
Who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away.
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Three updates in one day...with the possibility of another tonight! You should all leave a quick review to express your feelings on this. :)
This drabbles is dedicated to fantasmeqrt for BOTH the prompt, "Fissure," AND the nursery rhyme.
It is 376 words long, and it was a fun challenge.
I try not to use the word that is the prompt (in this case, fissure) during the actual piece itself, but I wanted to reiterate the theme of these things in this story: the cracks in the dream world, the shattering of Ash's skull, the crevices in Freddy's scars, and the fractures in his stony metaphorical heart whenever she pulls a stunt like this.
Then, when I was looking for a rhyme to pair it with, I stumbled across fantasmeqrt's suggestion of Little Miss Muffet, which was fun simply because I used the image of spiderwebbing cracks so often in the piece.
I realized after writing this and then re-reading some of my previous works that it's pretty similar to a scene in The Mouth: An Aside. I thought about rewriting the drabble—or removing it—but deciding against it. Therefore, I may have plagiarized myself. Deal with it.
Thanks for the two-part prezzie, fantasmeqrt!