#Leila 1 | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mortemoppetere · 2 years ago

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TIMING: late at night. PARTIES: @amonstrousdream & @mortemoppetere SUMMARY: leila has a late night snack at an all you can eat buffet. CONTENT WARNINGS: mentions of parental death, mentions of sibling death, ptsd.

Ravenous was the only word Leila had to describe her current state of being.

She hadn’t fed since the Kurt incident, not really. The idea of going into honey-sweet dreams every single evening and souring them until they were bitter and dark with fear was something that the mare could not bring herself to do. Even when every instinct that had taken hold after her death demanded it. Leila had held off for as long as she could, and now she was paying the price. Everything hurt. Ancient bones and blood-turned-glittering-dust were screaming for a dream to cling to.

She gave in. Eyes closed, and up, up, up into the astral. And she went to hunt a dream.

There was a loud thing that evening. Even if she hadn’t been so hungry, she would have caught a whiff of it. Loud dreams, loud memories, they were like a feast that demanded to be attended. There was a seat waiting for her, and all she had to do was pull up her seat. A guest of dishonor to pull at the weave of their mind until Leila had had her fill, until everything in her no longer cried out for something she could no longer have on her own. She would hate herself tomorrow when she replayed the nightmare she had woven in her mind. But for that evening, when hunger ruled over reason, she would be a monster.

Leila descended, a bit of shadow on a midnight breeze, into the dreams of a stranger.

Slayers didn’t need to sleep quite as much as most people did. It was one of those things that came with the territory, like the night vision and the toxic blood. It was a means of protection, a way of giving them at least some semblance of a fighting chance to make it to forty. Sleep was still necessary, but not as often. And even those limits, Emilio liked to push.

It wasn’t as if it was without reason, of course. Emilio knew what was waiting for him when he closed his eyes. It was the same thing, every time. A cruel time loop, a tape stuck replaying the same scene of a movie over and over and over again.

It wasn’t always exactly the same; things got muddled, sometimes. Changed based on what was happening in his life, where he was. But the feeling was always the same. The white hot dread. The heavy grief. The acidic taste of failure coating his tongue, metallic like blood.

There was the living room, the one from Mexico. Always bigger in his dreams than it had been in reality, as if his subconscious needed a larger space to hold the depth of what had happened here. There was the blood on the walls, the floor, the ceiling. There were corpses on the ground, more than there had been in this room in reality but less than he was probably responsible for. And there, in the middle of it, was a shape so small, so wilted. His heart was in his throat. He was…

He wasn’t alone. It struck him all at once, like a jolt of electricity. He wasn’t alone, and it wasn’t one of the monsters his subconscious usually allotted him. It wasn’t a vampire wearing his face, or Lucio with the knife in his gut, or his own bloody hands. There was someone else here, and they weren’t supposed to be. Wild eyed, Emilio whirled around. “Who’s there? Who the fuck are you?”

Leila could already feel the ache of the hunger that clawed at her starting to vanish as she settled into the stranger’s dream as an unwelcome guest. Sometimes the dreams were not so sweet when she entered them, their own subconscious tormenting them in their sleep. Those were the easiest dreams to settle into when Leila was ravenous simply because she didn’t have to think too much. The fears and pains that she would have to manipulate were already right there at the forefront of their mind. All it took was a little tug at their thoughts and suddenly she was an actor in a ghastly play.

The living room was grotesque. Blood was splattered across every imaginable surface in a room that seemed to be rapidly expanding… make it grow… feel small… It was routine. She would hate herself tomorrow for it, but for now… bodies. Limp limbs in strange angles and… The small one at the center made her feel guilty. More than guilty. Monstrous. But the stranger’s heart was beating so fast, and the fear of the dream rolled off. Hunger vanished, dreams taking and replacing the emptiness that lived inside her.

And then, something else. Something she’d never really experienced before. The dreamer knew she was there.

Quick as anything she became nothing but a shadow in an already murky dreamscape, the scene swirling like ink in water only to replay again, forcing this man closer to the things he wished not to see. I’m sorry, she wanted to say. I’m so sorry, it will be over soon… But dreams felt interminable for those dreaming.

The room reformed itself, the play started back from the beginning, look at the living room, look at the gore, look at the center of this macabre scene.

His heart was pounding in his chest, beating against his ribs like a prisoner beating against the walls of their cell. The room was disappearing, somehow, the walls shrinking around him as the bodies got closer and closer. His foot bumped against Juliana’s head, and it lulled to the side to face him, eyes wide and unseeing and accusatory. Emilio thought he might be sick, taking an unsteady step backwards.

Flora was in the center of the room, getting closer. The wall was at his back now, pushing him closer to her. It was sticky, tacky, and he knew why even if he refused to turn to look at it. “No,” he muttered, pushing back against the wall. “I can’t do it again, goddamn it, I can’t —”

There it was again. That presence, that tingle up his spine that didn’t quite belong. He’d been distracted from it with the changing of the scene, pulled back into the pile of bodies with familiar faces all surrounding that unimaginable thing in the center of the room, but it was there.

He clung to it, a little. This break in the monotony, this strange new aspect of things, this quiet change. It didn’t matter if it was a good thing or a bad one — it only mattered that it was different. It only mattered that it was something that wasn’t that too-small body in the center of the room, only mattered that it might keep him from having to look at it for a second longer. He didn’t care if it was something that wanted to kill him. That was far more preferable than this, any day of the week.

“I know you’re here.” His voice was hoarse, somehow, even though all of this was happening inside his head. “Are you doing this? Why? Para, por favor. Just make it stop.”

As the pain of hunger subsided a bit, it provided a clearer mind for the hungry mare. She hated the moment of clarity that came as she fed, always trying to force her to look and see what monstrosities she had created without abandon. Look for yourself, some hellish part of her begged. See what you’ve done? Make more. More would take Leila’s pain away, but as she watched the man stumble away in the shrinking room that she forced to grow smaller and smaller for just a moment more of sustenance, she wished that she hadn’t entered the dream at all.

The figure at the center was so small, so very small. The dreamer was forced closer still to her little frame, seeming to try to do all they could to look away from the scene. But that was the worst part of dreams. There were no eyes to close, no refuge to take from the story that unfolded in the mind. Look, look, see what you did? See what you couldn’t defend? His fear and grief were too much. Fear was a powerful elixir, one that broke the minds of mortals and fueled creatures of ideas, things that clung to life with a simple emotion.

The little body’s face was more visible now. Leila moved closer, instinct moving her while empathy screamed away in her mind to let the poor dreamer go. They were suffering. Go away. Leila… What she wouldn’t do to give them a dream- a nice peaceful dream where these figures that littered the room were happy, what she wouldn’t pay to let this stranger relive the happiest moment of their life, whatever that might have been.

Leila didn’t like to speak in dreams. The words usually became a part of the dream somehow, twisting and warping themselves into something to fear more in order to feed the mare. But as the shadows closed in around the man and the figure at his feet, she finally spoke. “I’m sorry,” The words were hoarse, hardly more than a whisper, but the voice was not her own. It was several unfamiliar voices joined together in a chorus- voices she did not know, but voices this stranger was all too familiar with. “I’m so sorry…”

The room kept getting smaller and smaller, pushing him further and further towards the center of it. He wondered if it would shrink down until the walls crushed him between them, wondered if the floor would rise up to meet the ceiling and grind him to dust with the rest of the corpses. In a way, he thought it might come as a relief. Physical pain had always been far simpler to deal with than whatever this was now, after all.

There was no avoiding that body in the center of the pile anymore. Emilio didn’t know if the spinning of the room forced him to his knees or if it was his mind that couldn’t handle it anymore. The knees of his jeans quickly soaked through with blood. If he were conscious, this position — him, on his knees in the floor — would have been painful. His bad leg would have been screaming, protesting the weight on it. The fact that it wasn’t served as another clue as to what was happening, but Emilio didn’t need clues. He knew a nightmare when he was in one. That had never been the problem.

He looked at her, at last. Her tiny features warped in death, eyes wide and unseeing just as her mothers had been before. He couldn’t remember if this was what she’d actually looked like, when he found her; grief had such a funny way of twisting things. There were moments of that day that he remembered as clearly as if they’d happened only seconds before, and there were moments he’d lost just as soon as they were over. It didn’t matter much, though, how accurate it was. This was the closest he could ever come to seeing his daughter again either way.

“Flora,” he said quietly, reaching a hand out. He touched her hair, and he didn’t know if the blood was coming from her or from him, only that it was there. He didn’t know if she was still bleeding or if it was all already over, only that he’d failed her. It was all he ever did, these days. Maybe it was all he’d ever done at all.

Everyone’s voices rang out at once in an apology. His mother, his siblings, his nephew, his daughter. They were all distorted, all far away. And the apology was worse, somehow, than the accusations. It hurt more. Flora’s mouth was moving, even as her face remained blank and her eyes remained empty. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It was Lucio’s words in her mouth, he thought. Hadn’t his uncle apologized when Emilio found him? Hadn’t the guilt and the grief said everything that needed saying? It was especially cruel, putting those words in the mouths of the corpses he’d betrayed.

“Stop,” he begged, unsure who he was speaking to. Was the presence he felt real, or had he imagined that, too? “Please. Just make it stop. I can’t look at her anymore.”

Flora…

Leila felt sick, half from gorging on a meal she had not wanted, half from the knowledge of the pain she was causing. The more she ate, the more lucid she became, the more she came face to face with the pain she was causing. Flora, the girl’s name was Flora… She wanted to pull this stranger far away from the gory scene that was playing out in his mind, but the closer the mare got to the man, the more the shadows pulled close and focused on the girl, the blood, the voices that echoed an apology that did nothing. These people were gone, and this man was alone.

The mare knew alone better than most people. In dying and being thrust into an eternal existence, she had outlived everyone she had ever known. She had stayed away from humanity as much as she could. But there was something about being confronted with a dead past that hurt more than anything. While Leila had been the one to die, this stranger was surrounded by death and yet still lived. A survivor in a sea of loss and tragedy.

She did the only thing she knew how to do. Leila pulled the darkness in so close it surrounded the man, wrapping him up in an embrace of nothing. It didn’t make it better. She knew that. Hell, it was a risk to do- the mortal could catch a glimpse of the waking world and she would become nothing but red-hot eyes in an eternal shadow rather than endless dark. But she was careful- so very careful… Slowly the faces of those the man had loved were obscured with shadow until they faded from vision completely. The words she had uttered were still a faint echo in the astral, apologies from long ago from voices long gone.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry… so sorry…

He barely registered the way the light seemed to fade out of the room. Even when the darkness overtook him entirely, it was like it was all still right there. He still saw his daughter’s body laid out in front of him, even when it was too dark to see his hand in front of his face. It was like the bodies were etched into the backs of his eyelids, there no matter what he did. There was no escaping them, no comfort in the darkness that blocked them off from view. Especially not when their voices continued to echo.

“I’m sorry.” His own voice joined the echoing chorus, hoarse and unsteady. “Mija, I’m sorry. I should have…” Should have what? There were a thousand things he should have done, and none of them made any difference now. He should have saved her, he should have stopped this, he should have at least had the decency to die for his sins. He should have done a thousand things, and he’d done none of them. What good would sorry do now?

He leaned forward, no longer able to feel the body or the blood or even the carpet beneath his palms. And was that better, or worse? To exist in a room full of corpses or to float in a black hole so empty that it felt as though you no longer existed at all… which was the real Hell? Emilio let out a shuddering breath, curling into himself. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “Please, just — I’m sorry.”

Many people thought that nightmares vanished in the night once the lights were turned on. That the tricks of the mind were wiped away, to return some other time. Even if the thoughts lingered on for a while, it was just a dream. Just a dream. Leila did not have that luxury. Each dream she fed on, each nightmare she created, they were a part of her. They were etched into her memory like carvings in stone. They were as much a part of her as the fine granules of glimmering dust that pretended to be stagnant blood in her veins.

So when the dreaming man’s mind called out the word Mija into the endless darkness that was Leila trying to reach out to comfort, something broken in her shattered completely.

His daughter. His family. The bodies were painted in crystal clear perfection in her mind, and there they would stay in some morbid archive of dreams that did not belong to her. Filed in a box somewhere in her mind. Tucked away as far as she could. But she’d still fed upon the dream. She’d still fed on that grief… And it was only a piece. Only a little piece, when this man had oceans of pain locked inside of him. Not oceans… planets. Galaxies. Infinite pain.

A gentle, shaking hand made of nothing but smoke brushed over the man’s head as she prayed that this stranger might forgive her. The most comforting that the nightmare could offer. Wake up… Wake up now, just a dream, just a dream… The thought she left behind in his mind was the softest whisper as she wrenched herself away from the dream as quick as she could, tearing herself back through the astral plane and back to safety, lurching back into a corporeal form with a ragged sob.

It should have been a kindness, the waking up. It should have offered some sense of relief, some quiet reprieve. To open your eyes in your own home, to realize that the horrors you’d seen existed only within the confines of your unconscious mind, it was supposed to be a good thing. For Emilio, it felt empty. He opened his eyes, sweat soaking the twisted sheets around him and clinging to the air in the dingy bedroom, the words just a dream echoing through his head, and there was no relief to it. There was no peace. Because it wasn’t. Not really.

The reality hadn’t happened exactly like the dream, of course — there was no echoing chorus of an apology, the bodies hadn’t all been stacked together in one neat little pile, there wasn’t a strange, off putting presence he swore he could feel in the back of his mind — but there was still a reality to it. His daughter’s body was a tangible thing rotting back in Mexico. His wife’s empty, accusatory stare existed in memory as much as it did in dreams. What relief could you really hope to find when your nightmares were things that had already happened to you? Where was the release when your waking life was just as empty as the one that haunted your dreams?

He leaned forward on the bare mattress, putting his head between his knees and breathing in, the ache of it vibrating through his bones. It was just a dream, but it wasn’t. That was the worst part.

After a moment, he got to his feet. The sun wasn’t up yet, wouldn’t be for hours, but he knew there’d be no more sleep tonight. He’d get a drink, he’d have a cigarette. He’d pretend any of it made him less empty than it was.

He’d see if he could convince himself it was just a dream after all.

#amonstrousdream #leila: bad dreams & screaming meemies #wickedswriting #parental death tw #sibling death tw #ptsd tw #s1 writing #season 1

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