And now it is time for WILLIAM
TWs: unreality, depiction of trauma/post traumatic stress. Takes place post-Season 4.
Day 8: Fears
For almost a week after the supercomputer shutdown, William would wake up in a cold sweat and he didn't know why.
He was embarrassed of it more than anything, even if no one would ever know about unless he told them, which he never would and never did. But he certainly didn't want to stumble out of wherever he was when he was dreaming feeling as if he'd been running from some kind of a threat. Especially not when he didn't have a reason.
He wasn't struggling. He was adjusting perfectly well to life on the outside again. Six months had been nothing, he'd told himself again and again. He hardly had to make up the things the teachers no longer cared about, or even the things they did. His parents were pacified, the teachers noticed no difference, and…
And the rest of them are a problem I'm going to save for after I deal with this, he thought. I usually prefer to sleep on my grudges.
He still lay awake in bed, half an hour after he'd turned out the light. Now whatever was in him that was causing these nightmares or whatever, it didn't want him to go back to them, or at least it wanted to delay his going as long as possible. But it was almost one o'clock. If he was going to look anything close to presentable the next day, then he'd need to go to sleep.
He shut his eyes. He twisted his eyes. He tried counting sheep, and failed at twenty-nine. He punched and kicked the wall, and got nothing but a sore hand and foot for it. He stared up at his posters, hoping for some kind of inspiration, or at least a hallucination that might let him know that he was asleep. Something he could remember for more than a few minutes after he woke up.
And then he had an idea.
He'd already gotten up and grabbed the dust-covered school notebook off his desk when he started having second thoughts. Only lameos kept a dream journal. Not unless they thought that they were somehow being communicated with by an otherworldly force, and they needed to write down everything they saw in the event that it might be useful to them. But then, William couldn't really be sure that wasn't the case.
He kinda hoped it wasn't. He'd been trying as hard as he could not to confront that reality.
He set the notebook by the side of the bed, with a #2 pencil on top. On second thought, he flipped past several pages of six-month-old Physics notes, stopping to rest on a blank page. He stared at it for a moment, wondering what words would eventually appear on it, before he turned back to stare at the ceiling, putting the journal out of his view.
He fell asleep in an instant, and an hour and thirty-seven minutes later he woke up again, sweating and choking on a scream.
He scrambled first for the light, then for the journal, fumbling almost more than he needed to as he headed for the page. The dream was fresh in his mind - somehow - he needed to get it down - he needed to write -
It felt like an eternity before the pencil was in his hand, but as soon as it was, he began to write.
There's blackness. Blackness but I know he's there. He's coming but he has no need to come. He's always there. Always watching.
He's taking and controlling and they're nothing they're doing nothing they're never helping me or trusting me they're there but they're not there at all they're there they're not he's here he's here HE'S HERE
He opened his eyes, gasped, slammed the book shut, then doubled over on the bed, blinking rapidly to assure himself that he was awake. Had…had he fallen asleep? He could distinctly remember hunching over the journal and writing the words, and then…and then waking up from it. As if something so vivid and mundane could be a dream.
But for thirty seconds he resisted looking back at the journal. He only had a half-memory of what it had said, but whatever it'd been… it had felt more dangerous than just an arrangement of words. As if the act of writing had been a sort of summoning ritual, a recreation of what he'd been taken from…
He couldn't take it anymore. He grabbed the journal and pulled it open to the page he'd been writing on. There's blackness, the paper said. Blackness but I know he's there. And nothing else after that.
He closed the journal, and turned it over. Then, he turned out the light and fell back into his bed. A second later, he got up, turned the light back on, took the journal, and shoved it in his sock drawer. Halfway to the bed, he turned back, grabbed the journal, took his room keys, and left the room entirely, heading for the boys' bathroom down the hall.
He soaked every page of the book in the sink, even the ones that were perfectly good and blank, until not a shred of writing was legible, and the book was entirely unusable. He tore the sodden pages out of the book, crushed them into an indistinct pulp, shredded the pulp into variously-sized clumps, and threw the whole mess into the bathroom wastebasket. Finally, he took the binding down to the hall trash bins, tore it in half at the spine, and disposed of one half in the garbage and the other half in the recycling.
Then he went back to his room, turned out the light, and fell directly to his bed, where he fell asleep in an instant.
He did not dream, not that he could remember.
And that's all for now! I'll be catching up on three days' worth of drabbles today, so be on the lookout!
- Carth