Acrophobia and The Nightmare
A Lyle oneshot
1252 words
Lyle wasn’t sure which came first: the phobia or the dream. They were both something that had always been there, lingering ever present in the back of his mind for as long as he could remember having conscious thoughts.
In the dream - more accurately, the nightmare - he would be free falling.
Hands of an indistinguishable size, shape, and colour reach out to him as an unfamiliar voice, different every time, screams his name. He tries to reach back, but his limbs are weighed down by the same rushing air that robs him of his words and breath.
It whistles through his ears like the howling of a monster or the scream of a siren. Its loud shrieking is like a warning, like death herself was calling out to him as he fell into her embrace. He is left helpless, eyes wide with terror, as he rapidly approaches the ground below.
He never knows how close or far he is to the ground, the distance changes every time he has the dream, but the anticipation of the impact is the worst part. The fear grows, the desperation rages. He pleads and pleads for the hands to reach him, to stop his demise, but he always knows he is going to hit the ground no matter what.
That is always the outcome.
He gains speed as he gets closer and closer to the end of the fall. His heart, high up in his throat, beats as fast as a hummingbird's wings.
He tries to close his eyes everytime, but everytime he is unable to. Instead, he is forced to watch. Forced to watch his paralyzed limbs struggling to move. Forced to watch the colours blur and shift. Forced to watch the hands reaching out to him growing smaller and further away until finally his body meets the ground.
The loud crunch of his body colliding with the ground (he never knows if it's grass or concrete or metal or something else underneath him) is something horribly unnatural that haunts him even in his waking hours. The pain is unbearable and all consuming like a thousand flames eating away at his being.
He is still unable to move his head from where he stares up at the mockingly blue sky, vision swimming nauseatingly, but out of his fading peripheral vision he can see his twisted limbs. There is blood pooling rapidly around him, the thick crimson coating everything in the vicinity until he lays in a sea of it.
He lays in agony as his vision fades in and out. Blood soon begins to choke him, his chest spasming as it bubbles up his throat and spills out of his mouth in quantities greater than a body should be able to produce. He’s drowning, his broken and mangled body struggling to keep itself alive on instinct even though he begs it to stop.
There's no more hands, no more voice calling out to him, no spectre trying in vain to save him any longer. He is alone and he is cold. He tries to move, to close his eyes. He can’t. Eventually his vision fully fades, the pain subsides, and he dies. Alone and scared.
When he was younger he would wake up every night screaming and crying, almost always tangled up in his blankets or having fallen off of his bed and onto the cold ground, which never failed to make him panic that much harder.
In the beginning, His parents would come into his room to comfort him, but as the years went on they grew too busy to be home much and he would wake up to an empty house. Those nights were the worst, and he barely slept a wink during period of his life.
Things got a little bit better once he started staying with the Foccarts while his parents were away. He loved sharing a room with Jacques, it was nice to have another person in the room with him at all times. He always did feel horrible whenever he inevitably woke Jacques with his screaming, though. Not that the other boy would complain, he would just sleepily pat his back and tell him it was alright until the two of them fell back to sleep, but the guilt was still there regardless.
Eventually he grew accustomed to the fear and the pain of the nightmare, and while he would still wake up full of terror, he would do it much quieter. When he was asked about it, he would claim that he no longer had the dream, that it had faded away with his age. It was a burden that he didn’t want to force onto others, a weakness he didn’t like sharing.
The phobia, however, was much harder to hide.
He could barely go up a flight of stairs or look over the second story railing without his knees going weak and shaky, his heart climbing high up into his throat as his lungs spasmed in an attempt to take in oxygen. Tears would well up in his eyes entirely against his will and he would squeeze them shut as tight as they would go while he tried to tame the twisting nausea in his stomach.
There were more than a few times when he was young where he either threw up because the fear was so great, or he had to be carried the rest of the way.
It was embarrassing.
He felt a sinking sense of shame every time he stood near an edge, glanced out of a ship window, or climbed a particularly tall flight of stairs with a banister he could look over and he felt that fear grip his very being all over again.
He tried, oh how he tried so very hard to get over this fear, but the thing about phobias is that they are hardly logical things. No matter how much hard reasoning or exposure therapy he subjected himself to, it did little to help.
When Querl’s abandoned alloy floated past him that fateful day during the Legion’s infancy, he had felt a surge of hope. He poured hours into his experimentation and creation of the legion flight rings. He was giddy with pride when they worked the first time he tested them and actually managed to hover a few feet in the air instead of crashing to the ground after jumping from his testing table.
Truthfully, the flight rings did help to reign in his fear just a little in the end. At the very least he had a semi-reliable guarantee that he would not be plummeting to his death anytime soon even if he should slip off of one of those horrible, unforgiving heights.
The fear was still there, though, floating around in the back of his mind like an unkillable parasite. The dream never did go away either, and he was left lying awake each night he didn’t spend passed out in his lab dreading closing his eyes.
So, he holds the banister a little tighter than the average person when he’s climbing high stairs. He stands as far from the edge as possible on raised platforms, uneasy eyes ensuring that he’s not too close and trying his best to mask the way his knees tremble. His eyes never stray towards the wind whipped windows of ships in motion.
He twists and turns the flight ring on his finger, praying to whatever higher power may be out there that it won’t fail him in his time of need.
He can only hope that the nightmare isn’t an omen.
13 notes
·
View notes
Plz explain then the travesty that is love and thunder
A trainwreck directed by an egotistical six-year-old in a leech of a man's body who thinks he's a screenwriter and still plays pretend with his uwu self-insert OC.
.... real talk, though, in short:
The real travesty of Love and Thunder is that Thor is already made of love and thunder, and simultaneously Jane is the love to his thunder, and the MCU, through taika wai-feck-off, decided he can be neither of those things, and have no nice things. Thor is the most tragic character in the ENTIRETY of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and yes, I do think more tragic than Wanda.
He has lost :
his entire home planet
his people
his entire family of four (no hela does not count he was not connected to her and should have been odin's sister)
before which he lost his brother (his platonic soulmate, to boot) a total of 3 times emotionally, two of those physically
he lost his ENTIRE friend group because his half-sister murdered Volstagg, Hogun and Faendral; he never reconnected with Sif
his only good mentor/parental figure (heimdal) was stabbed through the heart in front of him
he lost his dignity, his crown, his birthright (voluntarily and otherwise)
he lost his self-worth, his sense of direction (bc the writers legitimately thought his arc was about stepping down from the crown instead of making it his own and growing into it in his own way, by his own merits, at his own pace and gave it to some literally no-name side character that showed up for one movie and never respected thor in the first place to even earn his title from him smh)
and taika's idea of rectifying any of this .... is to give him some random child he doesn't know, that he doesn't care for, and manipulate him into taking her under his wing not because of the kindness and limitless love of his own heart even after shutting himself down post!endgame, but because jane asked him to as her dying wish — and then say that THAT is his happy ending.
Tell me why Thor, the longest standing of the Big Three, the king of the stars, the hero who is by all respects the embodiment of love, gets no companionship, no friends, no home, no place to belong, when Tony got a hero's send off and Steve got to be with an alt!dimension Peggy.
15 notes
·
View notes
Hiya friends, I'm having a writing predicament.
See I think just maybe my arranged royal marriage au might be too long. And mayhaps I need to break the chapters into their own stories and make the story a series.
Which is wild because the chapters were me trying to find the best places to split up the one shot that was getting too long. Plus that means that it might feel a little cheap to stop before the actual wedding.
But like let me explain why it might be too long. My first draft which was this 🤏🏾 close to being complete was a one-shot turned 3 shot, turned technically 4 because chapter 2 was split (chapters are named by "Acts" so chapters 2 and 3 are both Act II but Act II part 1 & part 2), then turned 5, then 6. It has about 35,988 words and again was incomplete(finished in my head.) But to put the chapter sizes in perspective, in my second draft, chapter one is currently 8,183 words. I'm still writing chapter two but I'm a third - halfway through it at 3,226 words. For comparison, the first two chapters of my tangled hs au are 3,926 and 4,601 words, chapter two being the longest of all the chapters I've written for it, chapter 9 the shortest at 2,899. Chapter 9 is not the end. With the way the story is going, there's still 4 (give or take one or so) chapters left.
Now that was a lot of words what am I saying? Well before I fully clarify, I love both stories. And I like reading both, and I have ideas still cultivating for both for my edits and conclusions. But it's easier to get in gear for the tangled hs one(I need less misleading nicknames for these). And I'm starting to think it's the way they're broken up. I think it's easier to get through thus easier to work on. See when I did draft two, draft one was a bunch of loosely connected scenes here and there (the beginning was solidly connected but as it went on the rest was just "oh I have an idea for a scene" several times some more attached together than others) so when doing draft two the hard part was making a calendar for the story and deciding when each event happened. Then I could just write the chapters like "this is day three so this thing needs to happen", and it's all heading to a conclusion and the chapters are complete chapters but they're largely built around small scenes I'd written, some things becoming a thing because "oh something needs to solidly get them to that point of their dynamic."
With the arranged marriage one, I started out solidly writing a story, each part in full, each part following the next, to the point that it visibly got too long to be a one-shot. With the tangled one, I was like oh to tie all this together this is gonna be too long to be a one shot, but with the arranged marriage fic I heard my sister in the back of my mind saying "some one shots are so long it's like okay you really could've cut that into chapters" or something along those lines as she told me before that she does feel like with some large one-shot there are clear good spots to cut it into chapters at and that it should be cut into chapters. So I thought, dang, this is probably one of those one-shots. I wasn't even done writing it I was on what became chapter three maybe now chapter four, thinking I'd be able to end it soonish but knowing it was long and needed that chapter split. So the division started up as large portions of the story. Then I went through to solidify them as solid chapters and fixing the pacing by adding more scenes to more clearly elaborate on the amount of time passing and what the characters were noticing. Which of course made the chapters longer.
Thus in editing and getting to the scene that's stuck in my head, it takes a minute while with the tangled hs au, revisiting rereading rewriting takes less time. I don't even think the arranged royal marriage one is a drag or anything but it's lengthy. In several aspects. So maybe leaning towards the bite-sized would make it easier.
However, I do have hesitance in doing that. See the thing is, it's a complete story. From chapter one to chapter 6. If I make them separate stories I have to work out if they standalone alright. Honestly, I think the first chapter would but Idk where to split it into chapters. And again how would I end the series? Like literally the last chapter is mostly wrap-up and fluff like idk if it can be its own standalone or if it would be a solid enough end to series rather than a single story. Like if I do this I'd have to probably expand it and I've already expanded it so much, it's so long.
On the other hand, if I do expand, like maybe I can throw in another perspective here or there as I do have thoughts on scenes that happened off-screen. I dunno though. But who knows how long it'll take if I do that. And I might have to give the others actual storylines. I mean like I could bring back the Izumi maybe having a crush on someone plotline that I scrapped because I was too indecisive but like that's a story rework lowkey? And another thing. I can't post a story until I'm done writing it but if it's a series would I be able to share the story as I go, as I finish individual works? Because finishing a whole series before posting any of it sounds like it'd take forever. But then I won't be able to go back and edit freely to make it flow better.
Oof. I don't know what to do.
1 note
·
View note