"HARA! Hara, wake up!"
His woke with a start, gasping for air, with Aela holding him down by his shoulders, peering worryingly into his face. His jaw was sore and he was drenched in sweat. The visions in his head had faded as soon as his eyes had open, but the sense of loss still lingered. Taking deep breaths, he steadied himself and sat up, propping himself up with his arms. Aela withdrew, sitting in seiza, placing a hand on his chest to caution him.
"Easy soldier. Are you alright?"
"Yeah...yeah, it was just..."
"A bad dream?" she offered, a sad smile on her lips, her iridescent irises glowing in the dark. "Hara, you were having a fit. I mean, a full on seizure. You were yelling and twisting...Stay here, I'll go grab the MediKit." She made to rise.
"No, Aela," he grabbed her arm. "I'm good. Truly."
"No, Hara, you aren't." Her voice had grown sharp in anger. "You won't talk about it, but you know as well as I do that you cannot lose like you did and still be okay! For the love of Mino, you've got to talk about it."
He sighed, laying supine with his hands behind his head. The ceiling of Aela's quarters were bland, quite unlike their counterpart on The Sabre, which were littered with photographs of her homeworld. "I...it wasn't that." Where to start? "Yeah, okay, I lost," he remarked, begrudgingly. It wasn't easy to admit, and hearing her say it had been hard. He kept his eyes on the perfectly barren ceiling above him and, before he knew it, it was all tumbling out of him. "I lost at Krypia. I lost my leg, I failed my mission, I couldn't protect them. I let you all down. The Collective won that battle and worst of all, it was him." He could see the face, leering, laughing, and leaving him broken on the battlefield. "And every night...well, usually, I relive the whole thing in my sleep. The dive, the escape, the trap. The duel. The executions. All of it. And every time I try to do something different. I try to see what I could've done to fix it. What if I had been faster? Stronger? What if I had just sucked it up and fought back when he..." He lifted his prosthetic leg and gently laid it back down. "Every. Single. Time. He. Wins," he finished, through clenched teeth. "And there's nothing I can do but take it."
Aela remained undeterred, a hand on his chest. "Look at me, Hara," she said, softly.
He finally made eye contact with her, blinking away the tears of frustration that had welled unfairly, trying their hardest to showcase his new found vulnerability. He had always had trouble looking her in the eye, particularly at night, when her the glow from her eyes were both alluring and blinding. In fact, he had often been warned against it by Lero. But now, looking into her eyes, he found not pity, as he had feared, but understanding. He started feeling calm and his mind cleared.
"It is in the past, Hara. You cannot change it, you cannot dwell in it. There is a whole universe out there, and there are people here, still, because of you. You have to let it go, Hara." She paused, taking a breath. "But that's not what it was today?" she asked. "Tonight was something else, wasn't it?"
"Yeah..." he said. "Tonight it was like...like a movie. No, really," he said, as she smiled. "It was just these...visions, scenes, like somebody was in my head, showing me something. I saw..." How could he describe it? What had he even seen, really? Why couldn't he remember it? It had been so vivid only a moment ago and now...now he felt his mind clouding, as if a fog was enveloping his brain. "I don't know what to make of it, but I saw things...people and places I had never seen. And something happened. To them, I mean. There was this war. Strange men, strange beasts and strange technology, but then everything changed. It was over, one of the beasts was slain and then the land was torn asunder and -"
"'Torn asunder?'" she interrupted, raising an eyebrow and biting her lip. "Arturi would be proud."
He smiled in spite of himself, sitting up to be on her level. "Well, there was this voice. In my head. Narrating, I guess?"
"Oh, so your dreams have voiceovers? Is that a Corangean thing? Because that's weird," Aela replied, crinkling her nose. He laughed, feeling strangely light, given the images that kept flashing behind his eyes. Images that flitted by, never staying too long. It seemed the harder he tried to recall his dream, the further it slipped away into the nether. At the same time, he couldn't help but notice how she looked in front of him, the curves of her body, how close she was to him. The light from her eyes seemed to pulse gently.
"No...we..it was different." His mouth was dry. He ran his tongue absentmindedly along his lips. "This hasn't happened to me before. But there were all these images and I can't remember much about them, or the voice. Things...they went by fast. There were cycles of war and peace, kings and queens, whole realms shifting and realigning. Son of...she called me the son of..."
"She?" Aela prompted. Her hand was on his chest again, drifting ever so gently.
"The voice...And the whole time the civilizations grew more advanced, killed each other with more and more power and then..." His brow was furrowed, trying to concentrate, but he couldn't look away from her, couldn't break eye contact.
"Then what?" Aela breathed, and her breath was sweet and inviting and when had she gotten so close?
"And then...it...was..." Her lips touched his and his mind went blank. Much like every other night, Hara barely slept. But it wasn't until the alarm rang and she hopped into the shower that he was able to shake the fog from his brain. He took a moment to collect himself. What had just happened? He remembered the dream then, and the melancholy. And he remembered, with some disbelief, the latter half of his night. He looked at the bathroom door, closed for the moment. Considering, ever so briefly, the consequences of his actions, he jumped up, open the door, and stepped across the threshold.
No comments:
Post a Comment