Night Lights and Dark Places

Chapter Twenty-Two - Fissure

He always mused that his conscious mind was so loud to compensate for his lazy subconscious; his anxious over-thinking a substitute for nightmares and a generally active imagination standing in for dreams. Sleep was mercifully quiet, and he was occasionally envious of the vivid, vibrant dreams that Tolly had so frequently.

That following day, he dreamt.

The setting was unfamiliar, but he recognized it as home, somehow. A vague, amorphous house; it breathed around him and rearranged itself in his periphery. Black and white, rooms appearing and disappearing. Everything around him was made up of wriggling scribbles and chaotic lines, but it was home. He'd drawn this place, and was living inside of it as he erased and edited, clumsy and nervous. His hands were shaking, but he couldn't manage to look at them and surmised it was because he couldn't draw hands very well.

From the sketchy ether, she flitted into his line of sight, crisp and substantial and whole. She was a flash of shockingly bright hues and soft shapes among the jagged pencil lines, and she regarded the drawings with a fond expression. He spoke to her, but wasn't sure what he said. She smiled and appeared closer to him, and he couldn't look away from her face. She took his unseeable hands in hers.

"Did you make this for me?" She asked, her voice distant. He hadn't thought of why this home existed, but decided that it was for her. The home he wanted for her, with her.

"Yes." They were the same height, he noted. She smiled again and she pulled her hands away, her palms slick with a black substance. He gagged.

"You'll die if you stay here." Her smile softened further. "Come home."

They were already home, weren't they? Did she not like the house he drew?

"I don't want to leave."

Her face became a blur, his vision swam and he lost focus. The chaos of the room began to calm, furious lines becoming still and even before fading away completely. With some anxiety, he noticed that his shirt was wet, noticed the tugging on his skin as his scars were stretched open, seeping lazy rivulets of thick, dark fluid. He looked back at her, still not able to make sense of her features, and she kissed him. Her lips were rough against his, horribly chapped, the act tearing them open at the cracks, but she persisted, and he reciprocated earnestly with an enthusiasm he didn't recognize.

Tiny hands dug deep into the weeping scars across his chest, fingernails painlessly grazing the surface of some unknown organ within him as she grasped desperately at exposed, glistening bone. The first rib came loose just as he bit off her lower lip.

And then he woke up, mouth dry and head spinning. The living room was dark, only slightly illuminated by the light of the setting sun. He exhaled heavily.

"Y'okay?" She called from the hall, and he nearly screamed.

James meant to respond, but when his gaze trained on the sound of her voice, he stopped, suddenly confused. In the hall, blankets had been hung up over a nest of pillows and quilts; a makeshift tent. In the middle of it all, Tolly sat cross-legged and scantily dressed, with a knitted blanket draped over her thin shoulders and her laptop open in front of her.

"I'm fine. What are you doing?" He made to get up from the couch, but his leg was asleep.

"Camping!" She said, beaming. "My sister and I used to do this all the time as kids."

"Oh." He didn't know if he should apologize. "Are you alright?"

"Peachy." Tolly scooted to her right and patted the space beside her. "Come sit."

He paused, a reluctant smile quirking his lips, and he rose from the couch. "I've never been camping before."

In his attempt to avoid knocking down the blanket ceiling as he crouched, he lost his footing and fell face-down into the pillows beside her. At least it was a comfortable fall. Tolly, bless her, did not laugh at his expense, nor did she ridicule him for his clumsiness. "It's warmer in here than it looks, right?"