After about a week or so, I knew that his nightmares would have to stop. He woke up each night, and after naps throughout the day, screaming and in tears. It still hurt him to walk or raise his arm for too long, so the sobs that racked his body wouldn't have helped much with his physical recovery either. He didn't let me stay with him when he went to sleep, he demanded that I leave the room whilst he dreamt. I wanted to know why, but he wouldn't tell me, so to make him happy I did as he asked, because he refused to even shut his eyes, with the exception of blinking, if I was even in the same room. He was terrified of them, and it usually took about ten minutes or so to calm him down. He was always embarrassed afterwards, the red colour in his cheeks giving it away, and his endless apologizes. The bruises were beginning to fade, and he said the pain wasn't as bad as it had been when he first got home, but the lack of drugs had brought him back to reality far too soon, and it'd come along with the bad dreams too. He didn't tell me what they were about, but it wasn't hard to imagine; running into the people that had made him like this. Sometimes, I thought that I was there too, because he'd shout my name and manage to get out of bed to make sure I was okay, and once again, that would have hurt lots to do that on his own. I still don't know how he managed to leave me without waking me up on the first day back home, the pain must have been unbearable. But the point is, the things that he saw, when he was in a different world where I could do nothing to protect him, those had to stop. I just had no idea how to make them.
"Are you tired?" I asked, expecting no response like usual. His head was lying in my lap, and he was staring blankly up at the ceiling. My back was against the wall behind us, so I looked down at him and waited, but my expectations were met.
"Alex, c'mon, are you tired? Do you want to go to sleep?" I repeated myself, hoping that this time he'd actually give me a reasonable answer, or at least respond in some way. I worried about him when he was like this, in some sort of daydream, or trying to forget what had happened, whatever he was doing when he stared into space and barely moved and tried to ignore me. It scared me, and he knew it, but he didn't stop. He never stopped, so I was scared all of the time.
"Yes, but I don't want to. I don't want you to leave me and go, but you'd have to if I sleep. I don't want to see what I watch over and over again, inside of my head when I do" he explained, his voice making him sound incredibly bored and annoyed, as if I'd made him tell me something I already knew, which to be honest, he had. Just not what he saw. He still wasn't looking at me, only what was above us. The ceiling never seemed to bore him. I'd of been sick of the sight of it by then.
"And what's that then? What's the scary thing that you see?" I asked. It was worth a shot.
"Nothing." He said a few seconds later, in the same tone of voice.
"Yes, obviously" I muttered.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"That you wake up screaming and in tears at nothing, and you're not scared of whatever you see. Obviously. How stupid of me to think that there was something."
He closed his eyes and frowned, another technique of his that I was becoming used to, whenever he wanted to block me out, couldn't be bothered to argue, this was what he did. I sighed, regretting what I'd said.
"Alex, I'm sorry, but you've got to tell me sooner or later."
"Tell you what?"
"Stop avoiding it and pretending you don't know what I'm talking about."
"Tell you what?" he repeated.
"You're acting like a child. Stop it."
"Tell. You. What?"
"ALEX!"
And then he stopped talking to me for the rest of the night, until an hour or so later, he asked me to leave the room. He didn't apologize or even speak when I ran in later on, to comfort him from his second reality.