No More Dreams- songfic entry. (15/6/12: 'Blinding')

No More Dreams, inspired by 'Blinding' by Florence and the Machine and featuring Dillon Maxey.
For ViceVerses' songfic contest, and exactly 1300 words.
Warning: dark, with some faintly unsettling themes.

The seats splayed out before him seemed to stretch into a single point; the door in the distance an event horizon of improbable design, like some twisted study in perspective. The notes he held, so carefully written (but no words on the paper) were supersized, massive in his hands, which had become huge and unwieldy. It truly was a study in perspective, but whose eyes the scene was drawn through remained unknown. Not his own, certainly.

The focus of the work of art that had been so lovingly painted around him sat in the second row, the one clear face in a sea of strangers (when had the lecture theatre filled?) and when she smiled at him her pride scrawled in meticulous notations around her head, penned into the margins in his own clear, decisive hand. Each precious, precocious thought made beautifully real.

?I love you.?

His hands caressed her, delicate, pale fluttering against her lovely dark skin. He pressed down and she arched up in the most perfect symmetry. He mapped every glorious inch with questing fingers, as enraptured by each caramel-toned toe as he was by her full lips, tinted blood red. Captivated by her eyes, he found lids held at half mast; he freed himself as they closed with the lightest brush of his fingertips.

Loosed from her gaze, he cradled her skull with both hands, his own head bowed down. Forehead to forehead, he breathed long and deep, as if he could inhale her through his nose. His spine bowed as hers had arched, his elbows beside her ribs, bodies fit together.

?I loved you.?

He slept, but his bed was cold, and it seeped into his dreams. His room was cold, as were the eyes that watched him; they made him sleep in tiny spikes of pain. Medications, meditations, mediations, and always, always the steady degradation of himself; the cold seeped into his bones. He would have dreamed, but even his medically induced fantasies held the bitter tang of betrayal.

He would have dreamed of warm places; hot touches, hot blood roaring in his veins, but the chill defeated even that. There was no escaping it; he was trapped six feet under in a place where those that craved the dark came to gnaw into his thoughts and corrode his sense of self. Soon, his dreams truly would be broken, and there would be nothing but the cold left behind.

?It hurt.?

It broiled beneath the surface, a lightning storm locked within the depths of his mind writhing to be free. In the dark, screaming at blank walls in furious confusion, his dreams began to rupture. His reality changed, forming new, nonsensical patterns and for the first time he found himself trapped. He beat his fists bloody against the constraints of his newborn universe, but pain didn?t break this dream, instead, the dark things that had lurked for so long in his peripheral surged forward to contain him.

He found himself snared in the cyclone of his panic and confusion. It was as if something vital had been taken from him, stripped away and torn to tatters before his horrified eyes. Through each agonising rend a new image began to form, so close to what had been his reality, and yet so fundamentally different that he couldn?t quite accept it to be real.

?It was poison.?

His eyes were wide, staring but not seeing; her eyes were closed, so how could he possibly ever see again?

For a moment, his thoughts were broken. Scattered. Wrong.

She was soft in his arms. Warm.

He had held her so many times like this, but never like this.

He shook to his very core, his bones frozen to ice. Because he held her, but she was in pieces.

?And you died.?

He touched her; every shredded inch. How could he not, when her lifeblood clotted between his fingers, working into pale creases and painting them scarlet. She was warm, but not for long; she had arched up into the blade that had pierced her, one sure strike followed by so very many more. Blood, once kept precious and inside, had spilled out to stain her lips a thick scarlet, her eyes, half-frozen still by the vestiges of terror, remained caught at half mast; a dull, accusing stare before dark lids were dragged down to hide it from view.

?A bloody, barbaric death.?

They tried to aid his decay, the ones who called themselves doctors. Doctors that were really jailors were really worms; they ate at him with their prying questions. He told them what he had seen; told them about the blood, about the death, about the way she had hung limply in his arms, her insides spilling out around him.

He told them how it smelled; the sharp tang of blood and the spill of intestines. How he had rebelled at the basest level from the scent alone as some animal part of himself screamed.

?You betrayed me. You died.?

He found her; enraptured and caressed, but they were not his hands. She cried with a passion loosed by the touch of another man, and then cried out in horror when the man who was bringing her such ecstasy was torn away by the one she had promised herself too. Whatever she had expected, it had not been what she had received for her sins.

He had loved her, so he didn?t make her watch what was to come; he simply mounted her in a single, sure sweep, and before she even had the chance to pull away the knife had driven down like a serpent and with a twisted sound plunged deep into her chest. Her back formed a glorious arch, and a mask of surprise overtook her face. She died before the horror even truly reached her, but the faintest traces of panic remained, splashed across both of their faces along with the first great gout of rose-bright arterial spray.

?You betrayed me and you died. I killed you.?

He was a proficient liar, but the most successful fantasies were always those he wove around himself. Once, he had dreamed of a future. He had planned out a perfect life, and when that life had imploded into fragments he had made himself a new world. He had taken her lifeblood, still a warm and sticky slick beneath his palms and he had painted a new reality around them.

He had rebelled at the blood, the smell, and he had screamed, but not in horror. In fury. Rapture. He screamed again, as exhilarated as he was enraged to be contained, when he finally broke past the medicated and mechanically created world that had closed around him. He had been unwilling to face reality, but no more. The conflicted, betrayed young man who had shied from the realisation that he had ruthlessly slashed apart the cause of his pain, the integral part of his imagined future who had found someone new, was gone.

Perhaps that life, the time before, had truly been a dream, and now he was awake. Now he saw the world with a new clarity, a new obsession, and oh, he had enjoyed it. His hands, clean now, but never clean in the eyes of the world that would forever judge him, felt bare. Only blood could renew them. Only blood could make him feel alive now, because when faced with what he had taken in the wake of his despair everything else paled to grey.

Oh, how he longed to paint the world crimson with his new, corrupted brand of lust. They were right, to keep him here; he was dangerous, insatiable now. He was so broken that there would be no rewiring him into something whole.

He would escape.

?No more dreams.?

dickclark gavin degraw gavin degraw alec time 100 bob beckel anna paquin