#i should be seperating them by class or singularity hrmm

[anonymouswordspasms]

the dreamcatcher of monte cristo

“It seems rather cruel to make you hold all our nightmares.”

An indifferent shrug. “I don’t mind.”

-

In between the walls of Chaldea, slipping between the shadows, is the Count of Monte Cristo. Vengeful, bitter, loyal.

A glorified dreamcatcher.

He peruses what trickles through his master’s bonds, strands of colours that swirl and swirl together until they become an ugly cesspool. He sifts through the rot and filth, plucking out dreams of gore and rape between his fingers and burning them into nothingness. There are as many good men as they are not in Chaldea’s colourful roster of servants. There are thusly as many nightmares as there are sweet dreams.

-

Dantes watches them slip through his fingers.

Some servants have dreams he rarely has to burn, only gently pruned when the dreams reach a bulk too great for one night of rest.

(If his master is tired, truly worn down, he stems the flow as best as he can.)

(Dantes would never let his master see his dreams- they deserve better than his stained, bitter memories.)

(He will spare them pieces of memory- the memory of salt water kissing his cheeks sometimes, the faded recollection of how his skin would warm under the sun after toiling at the deck. But these memories are so tattered, so old- he’s lucky to remember them at all.)

-

Some people, rarely have nightmares.

Little Nursery Rhyme’s dreams play like fairy tales- the good kinds reserved for picture books with bright colours and happy endings. He lets them through almost always when they appear, saving one or two for future rainy days.

(He burns the memories of the white-haired girl, barely a girl, barely alive, bedridden and dying.)

-

Some have better dreams than he expected.

Her royal highness Marie Antoinette, as darkly stained the final years of her life had been, dreams of love with such an intensity it’s fragments repulse Dante’s existence, Avenger as he is. Love for her people, her country, her children. Love that fought hatred and disillusionment at every turn and won. It mystifies Dantes. Love is not something he is capable of in this state, not so strongly. He has memories of it from before the Chateau, has a vague notion of achieving it after his revenge, but both times are foreign to him. All he has is the tantalising dregs of it.

But the Queen of France an incarnation of love itself- love at its most formless, most boundless. Dantes knows the him in Chaldea proper, solid and burning, has never met her face to face. Not for lack of trying on her part, but Dantes is nothing if not elusive.

Some have almost no good dreams, like Lobo. Dantes has lost count of how many times he’s burnt away the taste of human blood, the distant cries of a wolf in pain. The taint of an avenger is one he is familiar with, the damning inability to do anything but hate and hate and hate.

But.

Sometimes he glimpses open plains, the greenest of grasses slipping away underfoot as the dreamer bounds through the earth like a rogue wind. A brush against his fingers and Dantes’ lungs ease and for a moment- for a moment he doesn’t feel cold or smell the damp of a dungeon. He lets master enjoy these dreams to their utmost, the euphoria of an open sky and a warm sun so very infectious the next morning.

(He allows himself a peak. These are dreams for his master, and he can’t take them for himself. But he always allows himself a peek. It is too sombre without these peeks. Dantes does this because he has come to love this master of his, so warm and lovely, but Dantes knows that not even he comes without limits.)

-

Amakusa’s dreams are strange.

There is fire, there is gore, in all its cruel vividness but there is no substance, no detail. The red runs so thinly it is nearly grey, and when Dantes steps in out of curiosity all he feels is hollow detachment. Despite walking the dream from the view of its owner, Dantes vision resembles that of a moviegoer perusing a silent film.

“You are an unusual sight.”

Amakusa is younger, here. His shoulders have only begun to broaden, and the fat of youth has not yet fully left his face. His clothes are simple, torn and ash streaked, and across his Adam's apple is a messy line that bleeds.

“I am merely satisfying a curiosity. I will leave if you wish me to.”

Amakusa shakes his head in slow, careful movements. His hair, ending unevenly at his neck, sticks to the still-wet blood on his skin.

“I do not mind. Go wherever you wish.”

They part ways- Amakusa fading into the sea of bodies that drown the earth and Dantes into the castle that looms ahead.