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xelasrecords · 15 hours ago

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Endless Nightmare Ch. 1

Caleb x MC

Complications arise when Caleb conducts the Toring Chip dissolution on MC. She gets trapped in her worst nightmare and loses her memory every time he attempts the procedure, so he keeps her in his house while he finds the solution.

But time is running out. Every wasted minute damages her health. And she’s struggling to hold on.

A/N: This multi-chapter fic is set during Caleb’s Lucid Dream myth timeline after he decides to extract the Toring Chip that MC implanted in herself. The usage of gege here is not incest. The term is also used to call older males unrelated by blood in Chinese and can be romantic. Think oppa in Korean.

My dark, controlling LI pipeline from Secrets and Sacrifices to Violent Need to this is unreal, but I guess it’s only a matter of time.

Entire Fic TW: mild gore, depression, self-harm, suicide attempt, physical abuse, attempted sexual assault | Chapter TW: mild gore, suicide attempt

Total Words: TBA | Chapter Words: 4.4k

Masterlist | Read on AO3

The force of the blast threw her back against the fence.

She knocked her head against the wood. Her ears rang. The heat was scorching her skin raw.

She squinted at her burning house and the billowing smoke so dense that the world was plunged into darkness. Caleb just went through the door. Grandma had been washing the dishes when they left.

They were inside. They had to be saved. She had to move.

A hoarse scream tore out of her throat when she pushed herself up, her vision going dark for a moment. Patches of skin were sloughing off her hands, blood dripping down to the charred grass.

Her head spun at the sight of the exposed flesh and she looked away. This was nothing. She had withstood an Ignitus Wyrmlord’s firebreath that carved her thigh muscles down to the bone. This was ordinary fire. She had no reason to whine.

With her elbows, she rolled aside and hoisted herself up to search for an entry point that fire didn’t block.

“Caleb!” she shouted. “Grandma!”

The crackling blaze brought her no answer.

“Caleb!” she tried again. She stepped on a metallic necklace and pocketed it, not caring that it sizzled against her raw flesh or that she was smearing it with her blood. It was Caleb’s. He had to be nearby.

She kicked and dug through the rubble around her, her stripped fingers bleeding out from scraping against the rough surface. She blinked away her tears. She could not faint.

Caleb was not at the bottom of this pile. Or that one. Or another one.

Caleb was nowhere at all.

He couldn’t have left her alone. He just couldn’t.

She wouldn’t entertain those thoughts.

She hacked out a few coughs, thick smoke and ash stuffing her airway. There was no time to lose, they were still out there, they were, except—

That time was already lost.

She staggered to a halt. She had been here before, but she couldn’t recall when or why. The edges were slightly more blurred each time, but always just as vivid. The fire she could never prevent. Her home blown apart over and over. Chunks of acrid, charred flesh scattered on the ground.

This was a memory of a memory, but her senses were acutely honed the way normal dreams were not. Death was adamant about torturing her with its existence but never swept her away with it, no matter how much she pleaded.

She had buried Grandma’s body after this. A body that was barely one because most of it had crudely decorated her childhood house. She did not bury Caleb’s, but he was as dead as his death certificate confirmed.

Fire took without mercy, so she often submerged herself in the bathtub as penance. Sometimes her consciousness would slip when she held her breath for too long, but her Hunter survival instinct always kicked in, forcing her to gulp mouthfuls of air above.

It was disappointing how her body rebelled against death. It was her body, hers to command.

Her dearest people had left her alone without anything to go on for. It wasn’t fair.

Suddenly, she felt a sharp pull in her torso, and she lurched forward.

Her eyelids flew open. The nightmare fell away. Her heartbeat was so erratic that she could feel the pulse in her throat.

Caleb was dead.

Caleb was dead and she was not.

There was someone else, but that didn’t matter. No one mattered more than him. If she couldn’t remember, then they were not important.

A hot prickling sensation shot up her left arm and spread to the rest of her body. She tried to sit but bounced back to the bed, the grey sterile room spinning around her. Thick metal restraints were clamped around her wrists and ankles. Electrode pads were stamped on her head, the wires slithering to a machine beside her.

She sucked in little breaths, but the pain wasn’t subsiding. It was wrenching her nerves and her body was convulsing. She noticed a small chip inside her arm, the skin around it bruising, dark veins sprawling down her forearm.

The holographic display beside her beeped rapidly, lights blinking on multiple points. On top of it, she could make out a red warning flashing across the screen.

TRIAL NO. 03: ERROR DETECTED. 18% OF THE SUBJECT’S BODY IS AFFECTED BY CORROSION

She couldn’t remember how she got here. Or what she had been involved in, whether she had been battling a rogue Wanderer or if it was self-induced.

The opaque glass door slid open, and two men rushed into the room in brisk strides. The shorter, older one had a tablet in his hand and headed to the panels beside her bed, tapping on the screen while jotting down his observation. He administered something into the tube connected to her arm and the convulsions stopped, though the pain was still present.

The taller one was a familiar figure.

But it couldn’t be him.

She was pinned down by the weight of his attention. She used to think he was a boy who had swallowed sunshine and become one, but brightness had been siphoned out of him.

He wore the Farspace Fleet uniform like armour, the badge signifying his rank as the colonel. She wasn’t even aware that he wanted to work somewhere other than the DAA.

His face was devoid of warmth. He didn’t seem glad at the sight of her. His eyes were too sunken and his cheekbones were too pronounced to be healthy.

He didn’t look like her Caleb.

She had officialised his death certificate and lived on believing he was dead. She had stopped eating at the dining table because it reminded her too much of their last meal. She had slept and slept and slept because not one cell in her body wanted to be alive in a world where he was not. She had taken up missions in areas with highly volatile Metaflux activity on the off-chance that the Wanderers could finish her off.

And now he was standing beside her, brushing her hair away from her cheek. Only the worry etched into his face softened him. He had worn this expression thousands of times when she got hurt.

“Are you real?” she croaked.

He closed his eyes for a moment. The sorrow in them when he looked at her again made her heart ache. “I am.”

“How?”

The corners of his lips drew up into a small, sad smile. “Don’t you miss me?”

“What kind of question is that?” She balled her hands into fists and rattled her restraints. “Let me out.”

She needed to touch him to be sure. This could be another dream she had concocted to cope with the loss. She had lost so much—

The thought made her pause.

There was something else she had lost. Something that linked them together. She tried to retrieve a single clear memory and winced. Assembling her memories was like working on an abstract puzzle with the pieces missing. She couldn’t get the full picture no matter how hard she tried.

“Let me go,” she pleaded. “I need—I need to touch you.”

Caleb nodded at the older man in the adjutant uniform, and the clamps clicked open. Caleb tried to massage her skin, but she pushed his hand aside and flung her arms around his neck, ignoring the pain that reverberated through them.

His hands found purchase on her waist and steadied her when she wobbled on her knees. “I thought I was too late,” she said. “I thought I could never feel you again.”

Caleb drew back and cupped his hand over hers, raising it to graze along his jaw. The tactility of him nearly brought her to tears. Her left wrist, still slung around his neck, jittered, and she clenched her fist.

“I’m here,” he murmured into her ear. It sent shivers down her spine. She had missed this gentle, cajoling voice so much. She had replayed his voicemail every day in fear that she would forget how he sounded. “Use my body as proof. Touch me as much as you want.”

And she did. Roamed her hands across his sturdy arms and chest while he stood without moving. Ran her hand through his brown hair and indulged in the softness of it.

He was solid. He was there. She had fallen into his embrace and didn’t fall all the way through.

Then she realised new skin had been knitted around her hands, no traces of the explosion ever scarring her. “Why didn’t you come to find me?” she whispered. “I waited. I didn’t want to believe it until they declared you dead.” She buried her face into his chest. “Why now?”

“I’m sorry, the wait must have been tough.” Caleb rubbed her back in a soothing motion. “But don’t worry. Now that I’ve found you, I’m not letting you go again.”

She bunched the lapel of his suit and tilted her head up. They had never been this close before, and her breath hitched. “I’m not either.”

His grasp around her waist tightened. “Good.”

A glint of silver around Caleb’s neck caught her attention. “This was the only thing you left behind.” She traced the necklace, the apple charm and the engraving still intact with just a few scratches. “It got back to you after all.”

He was quiet for a beat and sat her back down. “Who gives the same present four times?”

She blinked. “What do you mean?”

He squared his shoulders, but their fingers were still intertwined. “This is the fourth time I got it from you.”

She tried to recall the other times, but her brain just buzzed with static. Aside from when they were both children, she couldn’t think of any other occurrences.

“Stop joking with me.” She laughed, but it came out uncertain.

Caleb pressed his lips together and shot the adjutant a look.

“He’s not, miss,” the adjutant cut in. He was reading her vital chart on the screen and enlarged a brain hologram. A myriad of red streaks wove through it. “The shock from your trauma has hindered you from accessing previous memories. These corrupted neural pathways keep rerouting you to the trauma, which means you only retain up to the memory of the explosion.” His gaze flitted to Caleb before going back to her.

She scurried to the opposite corner of the bed for a clearer reading of the diagram, but she didn’t have a background in medical training beyond basic emergency field drills. She couldn’t make sense of it.

She understood one thing though.

She wouldn’t do this to herself. She wouldn’t want to forget. She would rather recount an event in excruciating detail to remember what she had lost and use it to flagellate herself. She couldn’t even put away Caleb’s belongings in her apartment. He was a part of her. There was no way to erase that. She wouldn’t block out memories due to trauma. She wouldn’t forgive herself if she did.

“But I remember the aftermath,” she said. “The burial, the clean-up, the never-ending paperwork.”

The drowning.

She shoved it out of her mind.

Caleb exhaled softly. “Was Gran there with you?”

“I’m an orphan.” Her response was swift. “We grew up taking care of each other, remember? No one was there. We only had each other, just as we are now.”

“I’ll always have your back.” Caleb tipped her chin to meet his piercing stare. It made her feel like an insect tacked on the laboratory table. “But Gran took us in. I used to stay at her place when I visited Linkon.”

But there was no Grandma.

No one to chastise her and Caleb when they were throwing sand at each other at the beach. No one to tell them to swim, that it was fine, Grandma would look after their belongings.

No one to coax her to eat when she was on a hunger strike because Caleb was on a field trip and she had no friend to play with. No one to slice apples for them so they could snack with convenience after a tedious night of studying.

No one to fold old newspapers into a makeshift waste bin so she didn’t have to walk to the actual bin, an olden times trick, only for Caleb to one-up Grandma by floating the trash away. No one to cook for her when she dropped by for her weekly visits. No one’s lap to fall asleep on after watching a series that was probably on its hundredth episode and would never stop running.

No one who would exclaim, “Nainai de baobei sun hao piao liang!” while clutching her wrinkled hands to her chest, and she would grin because yes, of course your granddaughter was pretty, Grandma. It was all thanks to you. You took care of her when no one else did, thank you. She would never forget you.

But she lied. Because she did. She had forgotten her.

She had erased Grandma’s smile which brightened her whole face whenever she saw her visiting. She had felt so proud of being the cause of Grandma’s happiness. She had been so loved.

She would never see her grandma smile again.

Scalding agony fired up her left arm, and she fell back to her bed, her limbs spasmed uncontrollably. There was a burning from the inside not unlike the fire that blistered her face that day.

She could hear the adjutant speaking in an urgent tone to Caleb, but white pain burst behind her skull and she lost grasp on their conversation. She couldn’t move her eyes, her stare fixed on the hexagonal ceiling as her world darkened around the edges.

Ni teng nainai ma?

Dang ran wo hen teng nainai!

For all her reassurance, she must not have loved her grandma that much.

Caleb’s hand hovered above her, weighted energy pinning her limbs to the mattress. The restraints clicked around her wrists and ankles. “You need to get hold of your emotions.”

“She died.” She wheezed, trying to breathe through her mouth. Her nerve endings were fraying. “She died and I couldn’t save her.”

There was no Grandma because she was dead all along.

The monitor alarm blared, and she was thrown back into her nightmare.

———

What was madness? Repeating something over and over with the expectation of yielding a different result.

She was hurled off the ground again, flames in her face and her childhood home again, losing everything again.

She could only see the echoes of this nightmare when she was in it. But it got emptier each time. There used to be a siren from afar, but now it was just her and the crackling house, smoke rising high.

She broke into a mad dash when she remembered Caleb had just entered before the house was bombed. They had been eating alone. He had prepared all the dishes for her. She had been missed and loved and taken care of.

If there was someone else in her life missing and loving and taking care of her, she couldn’t remember. All she knew was that she and Caleb grew up looking after each other, so she should look for him this instant, but he was nowhere to be found.

Tears streaked down her cheeks. There used to be a warmth that didn’t set her world ablaze, that simmered at the right temperature and she could sink into its comfort without worrying about anything else. It was more than Caleb, something bigger than them, something that tied them together.

There was no use in trying to remember now. She wouldn’t ever get it back.

She rounded the perimeter, but the piles of rubble were just concrete. She shouted for Caleb until her throat was hoarse. She tripped over a chain and went back to it. It was a dog tag necklace stained with soot.

She only noticed how awful the state of her hands was when she reached out for the necklace. The skin was melting and blistered, offering her a peek into the angry red flesh that charred at the edges of the skin. She bit her cracked lip and kept the necklace safe anyway.

Trapped in this humid air, her tongue tasted like sandpaper. It continued to be so as she signed Caleb’s death certificate and lowered his empty casket and lowered herself into a bathtub of freezing water.

Whoever claimed death by drowning was agonising was wrong. You didn’t always have to suffocate. If you let the water overtake you, you could sink into a deeper silence where even your thoughts were quiet.

She floated beyond her body, up, up, up—

Then she was thrust back into it.

She emitted a sharp gasp when she awoke, bright lights blinding her vision.

Bright lights and a man who bore an uncanny resemblance to someone who was supposed to be in ashes.

“Caleb?” Her lips trembled. “Is it really you?”

He stared down at her, his eyes shadowed by the tilt of his head. “Is there another me in the world?”

Her thoughts stumbled, unsure. He looked less like her friend and more like he could kill her. Without sparing her another second, he directed his attention to the holographic screen above her.

TRIAL NO. 04: ERROR DETECTED. 27% OF THE SUBJECT’S BODY IS AFFECTED BY CORROSION

“This isn’t working,” he said to his colleague, who simply nodded and input something into his tablet. “Do you know who you are?” Caleb spoke to her.

But this could not be her Caleb. He would’ve been happier to see her and rushed to reassure her that everything was fine.

Not that she felt fine. Her entire body was sore as if she had been slammed by a Wanderer, but the last thing she did was submerge herself in water and that had never produced this side effect. Perhaps she had pushed it too far.

That wasn’t all. There was an insistent stabbing in her left arm that rose to her neck. Black streaks grew from a rectangular point like infected branches, and the fingers took more effort to lift than her right hand.

Her gaze darted back to Caleb. “What’s going on?”

“Do you know who you are?” he repeated, leaning close to her until she could see the faded scars on his cheekbones.

“Your best friend, but it doesn’t seem like you recognise me,” she replied. “Aren’t you supposed to be dead?”

He arched his brows. “Glad to hear you want me dead.”

She shook her head fervently, though it had the unfortunate effect of inducing vertigo. She frowned and Caleb laid his hand on her forehead, keeping her still.

This, she indulged in. He was alive. He was real. She could feel his touch again. She could’ve cried from the sheer relief, but she felt a jolt from her left shoulder that distracted her from the thought.

Caleb strained his neck and massaged its side. “Don’t make sudden movements if you don’t want to worsen your injuries.”

“How could you?” she blurted. “I never wanted you dead. I mourned for you for almost a year. I—”

A sharp sting suddenly sluiced down her spine and her back curled into a bow, her body stiffening. She bit her lip from yelling out and a metallic tang trickled down her tongue.

Caleb tensed and spoke to the older colleague without lifting his eyes off her. “Liam, administer the painkiller.”

Liam tilted her head to the side and injected a syringe needle into her neck. The effect was almost immediate. Her body relaxed into the mattress and she could crane her neck without feeling like she was doused in fire.

“This should last for a couple of hours,” Liam said. “Take care not to use it regularly. Increased dosage lowers its effectiveness in the long term.”

Liam was dressed in the adjutant uniform for the Farspace Fleet. It seemed that Caleb was his colonel. A lot could happen without her realising. One moment she was drowning, the next moment someone wearing her dead friend’s face was treating her like a stranger.

She caught the first question that flitted through her mind. “Why is my arm like this?”

Caleb scoffed. “That’s the proof of your idiocy.”

Many times she had imagined how she would react if Caleb turned out to be alive. His body had never been found. There was an element of plausibility if she tried hard enough to maintain it. But in all her scenarios, she had never dreamed of him being caustic.

“I believe we should inform her of the situation, sir,” Liam advised. “Keeping her in the dark hasn’t been successful thus far.”

Caleb sighed and rounded the bed. “Do you remember implanting the Toring Chip in your arm?” His fingers grazed the black veins in her arm lightly, leaving goosebumps in their wake.

“I don’t even know what that is.”

“Just as I thought.” He sneered at her. “The chip suppresses your emotions and memories while corroding your body over time. It’s amazing how you always manage to surprise me with your stunts.”

She recoiled at his expression. The Caleb she knew would say the same thing but with mirth dancing in his eyes. This didn’t sound like a harmless teasing. It sounded like she had used up all his kindness and now he was fed up with her.

“It couldn’t have been me,” she said carefully. “Body modification is a serious matter. I wouldn’t be reckless about it.”

“That was you, all right.” Caleb tapped at the chip embedded inside her. “Logic was the least of your priorities.”

“Then what was?”

His jaw clenched. “Who knows what went through your head when you did it.”

“You would know,” she shot back. “You always do.”

Caleb retracted his hand. “Apparently there’s a limit to what I can do.”

She examined the screen crowded with warning alerts. “I guess something went wrong with the Toring Chip?”

“Your brain currently suffers from the most damage with your left arm following close.” Liam put her neural scan and cellular projection side by side. “If we don’t take quick measures to fix it, the damage will spread and you will lose all your memories.”

Liam swiped to feature another side of her brain. She understood enough that the darker areas indicated an abnormal brainwave activity.

“However,” he went on, “your brain has an adverse reaction to the dissolution procedure. It locks you in your worst memory and dissolving it without getting to the root of the error will trap you there forever.”

Caleb nodded at Liam, and Liam clasped his hands over his tablet.

Her blood went cold. She was barely keeping up with the onslaught of information. “Is there any way to stop it?”

“Keep your emotions in check while we handle the rest,” Caleb said. “If they rise beyond the chip’s threshold, your short-term memory will be erased.”

Caleb studied her closely for a reaction, but she just felt numb. There were many things she needed to make sense of, but the more she tried to remember, the louder the pounding in her head became. The very act of thinking was driving nails through her brain.

She needed to be alone. She couldn’t sort out anything with these people watching her. Who was she without the experiences that shaped her? Was she still the same person because she had lived through them even though the knowledge of them had vanished?

“How much have I lost?” Her gaze was fixed on the red forming around her restrained ankles. She must have been here for a while.

“No one can gauge that for you,” said Caleb.

“I should be able to.”

“You would have,” he agreed.

She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I need some time alone.”

Liam exchanged a glance with Caleb. “We can’t do that, miss. You are to be put under observation at all times.”

She let out an incredulous laugh and pulled at the thick cuffs over her wrists. “You’re treating me like a prisoner, not a patient.”

“It’s for your own good.” Caleb crossed his arms. “Do you think you can handle all your symptoms alone?”

“I’m only asking for temporary privacy.”

Caleb pressed a button on the side of her bed that unlocked her restraints. “Fine.”

Her eyebrows lifted. She didn’t expect him to relent so quickly. Caleb loved to argue with her when her safety was concerned. That was one of the few things she could pick out with clarity from her muddled mind.

“She’s coming with me,” Caleb said to Liam. “Wrap up today’s analysis and bring it to my desk. We’ll continue tomorrow.” He bent down to her level, his voice lowering so only she could hear him. “You’ll have your own private room in my place. No one will find you. You’ll be safe.”

“Is it safe to discharge me when I haven’t recovered?”

“There is no recovery for you,” responded Caleb coldly. “The data we have so far is sufficient. We don’t need you present in the lab for future research when I can gather your diagnostics anywhere else.”

Then it hit her. She had operated under the assumption that this was a hospital, but the room was designed like a military research facility. It was windowless and lacked the antiseptic scent she was used to, though she couldn’t recall why she could be so familiar with hospitals.

She couldn’t remember why she could be tangled up with research facilities in the first place either.

Caleb scrunched his fists and released them. “Be obedient if you don’t want to get hurt.”

It sounded as good of a threat as any, but she had nowhere else to go, and Caleb held more answers than her blocked brain did. He was the only one she had left. She remembered nobody but him and wanted nobody but him.

She hoped a part of him still remembered her with fondness as well.

She rubbed her sore wrists. “Will you hurt me?”

“Don’t push me.” He straightened the medical gown hanging off her shoulder, his calloused fingers sliding against her collarbones. “That’s all I ask.”

Footnotes:

Chinese translations:

1) Nainai de baobei sun hao piao liang!: My dear granddaughter is so pretty! *Grandma calls MC baobei sun in the game which I think is endearing. 2) Ni teng nainai ma?: Do you love me? 3) Dang ran wo hen teng nainai!: Of course I love you so much!

“Is it really you?” “Is there another me in the world?” is a callback from their first reunion and Caleb knows it.

I hate battling boss dragon Wanderers with a passion hence the Ignitus Wyrmlord mention.

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xelasrecords · 2 days ago