[MM] Jan 2.4.3: The nightmares I can handle, it’s reality that’s the problem.

after this, this, this, this, this, and this


She was exhausted. Physically aching all over and craving sleep, mentally stretched as far as she can go without breaking. After the awkward moment when she has to ask where she can sleep, after she takes clothing and the toiletries that she's told are hers into a scantily furnished guest bedroom, she drifts off almost the moment her head nestles into the pillow.

She sleeps. For a while it's peaceful, warm, blessed sleep. And then she dreams.

Only they're not dreams.

They're nightmares.

Of blood and violence and creatures with yellow eyes and warped faces. Monsters that kill and bite into flesh and feed. A girl that fights, and fights, and fights until she dies. Flashes of graveyards, crosses and stone angels.

She wakes up sobbing because it's too much and it doesn't make sense. She locks herself in the bathroom, hides in the shower until the water goes icy. Wipes the fog from the mirror and stares at her blurred reflection and tries to make some sense of it. She doesn't know why, what compels her to pin up her hair and examine her body, but she does. She has freckles, tiny moles, one on her jaw, one between her breasts. She has scars. Most of them are old, pale and faded. There's a mark on her chin, barely visible, one on her knee with the clearly marks of stitches. There is one on her palm that is raised and oddly shaped. There are two on the back of her neck, just below her hairline. Two vertical lines, intersecting with a curved crescent. She lays a hand over them and remembers the monsters of her dreams. The ones with the warped faces and vicious yellow eyes, the ones that bite, and feed. She trembles, chilled from the cold water, confused, lost, because it doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make sense.

She re-wraps the towel around her and curls up on the bed, afraid to sleep, afraid to dream. Most of all, afraid that the reality she's forgotten may be too much to face.

OOC lulz to take a break from angsty stuff, and because Claire!mun asked. XD

Annie and Baileigh's Master List of Red VS Blue Inspired Nicknames

Baileigh--Church. Light blue armor. A Captain Private with a dead Captain. Leader of the Blue Army.
Annie--Tucker. Teal armor. Member of the Blue Army. Makes 'bow-chicka-bow-wow' jokes a lot.
Claire--Tex. Black armor. Badass chick from Texas. Free agent unassociated with any army. Beat a guy to death with his own skull.
Sark--Wyoming. Silver armor. Free agent. Kills people for money. Is British.
Adam--Vic/Command. No armor. The one that created the fakey fake war and pit the Blue and Red army against each other just for shits and giggles.
Devon--Griff. Orange armor. Red Army. Likes ribbons in his hair and wants to kiss all the boys.
Mohinder--Doc. Purple armor. Is a medic, not a doctor. Mostly just makes people comfortable until they die.
Sylar--O'Malley. The evil AI that used to live in Texas's head, now resides in the Doc (well, did at the end of season 3. insert bow-chicka-wow-wow joke here)
Cain--Sarge. Red Army, red armor. Is gruff and grumpy.
Hank--Simmons. Red army, maroon armor. Kisses Sarge's ass a lot. Would totally slit your throat in your sleep.
Peter--Donut. Red Army. Has pink armor. Likes frilly soaps. Is gay.

Still not bequeathed upon anyone: Caboose and Lopez. No one is awesome enough to be Caboose, boring enough to be Lopez. :P

[MS] January

Lean on me, lean on me >> Give it a try, it won't hurt --You Am I – ‘Doug Sahm’


She’s been hiding. Not meaning to, per se, but shut up in the room that is not the room that she shares with the man downstairs but a guest bedroom, which is precisely what she feels like, a guest, a stranger passing through. She ducked into that bedroom, briefly, to look around, to rifle curiously through a few drawers. That was where she found the pictures.

Shoeboxes and albums full of them, all of perfect strangers, the strangest of all being the very face that looks back at her from the mirror, staring up at her through the gloss of photographs, smiling, happy. She scooped them up and rushed back to the guest room with them, curled up in the corner of the sparsely furnished room and gazed at each one almost greedily. Some of them are landmarks and places, but she tosses them back into the boxes impatiently, uncaring of some monument or casino or fountain. It's the faces and the smiles that she can't look away from, pieces of warmth that she clings to almost too tightly as though hoping she can absorb just the slightest bit. They’re split second snapshots of everything that she’s lost, but they’re tangible, they're something. They’re people that she knows. Friends. Acquaintances. Family, maybe. Some have names and dates or locations written on the back in a looping hand that she traces with her fingertips and wonders if it’s hers. Claire and Sylar, Christmas ‘08. Adam, Peter, Mohinder and Julian, Rockefeller Center. Rico & Me. Val and Hank outside of Caesar’s. Tucker and Church @ GAMESTOP posing w/ Master Chief.

It takes her a moment to identify the pangs in her chest as more than an aching sadness and confusion and longing. There’s hope there as well.

The sun’s setting by the time she creeps downstairs with the boxes and albums in her arms. She shouldn’t feel so guilty for sneaking around a house that’s supposed to be hers, but there’s still a bit of sheepishness in her expression, in the way she bites her lip and hesitates to even approach the man she’s told she’s to marry. She believes it now, though. That she loves him, even if she can’t find the emotion in her. She’s seen the way she smiles at him in those frozen snapshots of time, and the way he looks back at her.

“I found these,” she admits, which sounds better than ‘I went snooping,’ and she sets the boxes and albums down on the coffee table and withdraws the top stack, the ones that had jumped out at her the most, the brightest smiles, what seemed the happiest times. “Tell me about them,“ she requests, almost pleads as she hands him the stack, and for the first time since the lights went out in her mind, there’s something there besides a vacant confusion in her eyes.

There’s hope. Wild and uncertain, but hope, nonetheless.