![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Aug. 10th, 2011 11:53 pmAlex has always had nightmares.
Prior to MI6, they were the usual thing you’d expect, nameless monsters that faded away with dawn’s light and slipped from his memory. After Ian died, his dreams became... unpleasant, shadowy and painful and filled with figures just past his peripheral vision, but he wouldn’t have called them nightmares. It wasn’t until Point Blanc that he really understood the meaning of the word. For the first few weeks, she seemed to know when he was up and when he needed company, but after that – it wasn’t that he stopped having them, just that he’d learned to be quiet. Jack never really knew the extent of what he was going through, how every time he went to bed he was back in that school, running and terrified and being pulled apart by scalpels while he screamed out his pain, unable to move. She never knew that he’d seen himself die, literally and painfully, in Julius Grief, and that the image was forever burned into his memory, like the scorch marks a fire left even after it had gone out.
After a while, they had come less and less frequently. And he thought maybe they would go away for good.
Then John Crawley offered him tickets to Wimbledon, and it started all over again. Only now, it’s not just Point Blanc waiting for him in his mind. When he’s awake, he feels hollowed-out and exhausted and dead. When he’s asleep, his mind becomes a playground for every terrifying thing he’s felt, every feeling of panic and pain and painful resignation that he was facing the end of his future and the best he could do was try to stop more people from dying with him. And he hears that one last gunshot, over and over, in a thousand reiterations. Sometimes, all he can do is watch in horror while Alexei Sarov puts a bullet through his own skull. And sometimes, the gun turns to him at the last minute; he’s been shot in as many places he can think of as many times as he can remember.
Once, Sarov’s face twisted into a grotesque caricature of John Rider as he held the gun to his head. He’d sneered at Alex that he had no right to even still be alive, that he had no place in the world anymore because he was supposed to have died at the hand of Sarov – it was only a massive cosmic mistake that he was even still breathing. He woke up from that one tangled in his sheets, hardly able to breathe, and had had to stand in the shower just letting the hot water run over him for almost twenty minutes before he felt like he could even face himself in the mirror.
At one point, he considered going back home to Jack, but the thought of being somewhere with so many happy memories of his childhood – and just that, the realization that he thought of being a child as something that has already come and gone knocks all the breath out of him and leaves him curled up against his bed, exhausted by the revelation. That’s it, really: Milliways may not be home and it may not have Jack, but somehow it’s easier to go through this non-existence he’s leading without constant reminders of how, just a short time ago, he was a boy who lived his life without these scarred reminders of what he’s been through. And it’s unfair, and it hurts, and sometimes it makes him angry – and he tries to hold onto that, because it’s one of the few non-deadened emotions he has left, but it always slips out of his grasp eventually and leaves him empty again.
So he sleeps when being awake is too painful, and he stays awake when sleeping is too terrifying, and he eats what he can when he can bring himself to it, but it would take deeper resolve than he currently has in him to call what he’s doing living.
Prior to MI6, they were the usual thing you’d expect, nameless monsters that faded away with dawn’s light and slipped from his memory. After Ian died, his dreams became... unpleasant, shadowy and painful and filled with figures just past his peripheral vision, but he wouldn’t have called them nightmares. It wasn’t until Point Blanc that he really understood the meaning of the word. For the first few weeks, she seemed to know when he was up and when he needed company, but after that – it wasn’t that he stopped having them, just that he’d learned to be quiet. Jack never really knew the extent of what he was going through, how every time he went to bed he was back in that school, running and terrified and being pulled apart by scalpels while he screamed out his pain, unable to move. She never knew that he’d seen himself die, literally and painfully, in Julius Grief, and that the image was forever burned into his memory, like the scorch marks a fire left even after it had gone out.
After a while, they had come less and less frequently. And he thought maybe they would go away for good.
Then John Crawley offered him tickets to Wimbledon, and it started all over again. Only now, it’s not just Point Blanc waiting for him in his mind. When he’s awake, he feels hollowed-out and exhausted and dead. When he’s asleep, his mind becomes a playground for every terrifying thing he’s felt, every feeling of panic and pain and painful resignation that he was facing the end of his future and the best he could do was try to stop more people from dying with him. And he hears that one last gunshot, over and over, in a thousand reiterations. Sometimes, all he can do is watch in horror while Alexei Sarov puts a bullet through his own skull. And sometimes, the gun turns to him at the last minute; he’s been shot in as many places he can think of as many times as he can remember.
Once, Sarov’s face twisted into a grotesque caricature of John Rider as he held the gun to his head. He’d sneered at Alex that he had no right to even still be alive, that he had no place in the world anymore because he was supposed to have died at the hand of Sarov – it was only a massive cosmic mistake that he was even still breathing. He woke up from that one tangled in his sheets, hardly able to breathe, and had had to stand in the shower just letting the hot water run over him for almost twenty minutes before he felt like he could even face himself in the mirror.
At one point, he considered going back home to Jack, but the thought of being somewhere with so many happy memories of his childhood – and just that, the realization that he thought of being a child as something that has already come and gone knocks all the breath out of him and leaves him curled up against his bed, exhausted by the revelation. That’s it, really: Milliways may not be home and it may not have Jack, but somehow it’s easier to go through this non-existence he’s leading without constant reminders of how, just a short time ago, he was a boy who lived his life without these scarred reminders of what he’s been through. And it’s unfair, and it hurts, and sometimes it makes him angry – and he tries to hold onto that, because it’s one of the few non-deadened emotions he has left, but it always slips out of his grasp eventually and leaves him empty again.
So he sleeps when being awake is too painful, and he stays awake when sleeping is too terrifying, and he eats what he can when he can bring himself to it, but it would take deeper resolve than he currently has in him to call what he’s doing living.
