Archive of Our Own

It feels like a dream. 

That’s the only thing that would make any sense.

This is a dream, and you’ll wake up any minute and find yourself twisted up in the covers with somebody snoring quietly beside you. You’ll be covered in sweat and breathing heavily, but then you’ll forget and it’ll be fine. Your alarm will go off in twenty-six minutes and you'll greet the day with a forced smile on your face, and it'll be fine. There’s no way this can be real. It can’t be. 

(Except it is.) 

It’s a blur. The before. 

You remember sitting in your car, and switching on the engine. You remember the vibration as it started up, the movement as you switched off the auto-starting radio. You remember the pull. You remember pausing, and placing your forehead on the steering wheel, and you remember the regret. The all consuming regret. 

You remember thinking about switching off the engine, unloading the car, and slipping back under the covers next to him and pretending like everything was fine, that nothing had happened, that you were okay. 

That everything wasn’t burning down around you and clawing at you from the inside. That you could just try to ignore the phone calls, and the whispers and the noises and the pulling, always the pulling. 

The pulling was the worst, you think. The compulsion to find out more, to know. To understand. You’d always been like that, you suppose, but this was different. Wrong, weird, supernatural. You knew it was unhealthy, you knew it was hurting him - and others too, but you couldn’t stop. It hurt to resist, and so you let it tug you along. You were compliant in your own destruction (and now the pain is even worse.) 

You remember hesitating at the wheel for so long that you noticed a package laying on your front porch. Unusual, perhaps, since those kinds  of things were usually sent to your work to avoid potential awkward conversations. You don’t turn off the car, but you do open the door to scoop up the package. Maybe you thought it would solve your problems, maybe you thought it held the answers. Maybe you were excited and hopeful, but you don’t remember - don’t want to remember. Can’t.

The next thing you remember is waking up, face down in a field. The grass is poking into your face, irritating your skin and making your nose itch. You try to make yourself move, but you can’t. You’re not sure why, but your legs aren’t working. None of your limbs are.

So you lay and wait. For what, you don’t know. You vaguely register confusion, and fear, but they’re pushed dully to the side, and replaced with annoyance at the fact your clothes are damp and probably muddy. It’s uncomfortable, to say the least, and your neck is stiff and aching. You struggle to hold onto anything with any meaning, and you can feel sense slipping through the fingertips you can't move.

You fall in and out of consciousness, and there’s no way of telling how long you lay there. There aren’t any of the noises you’d think would be present in a place such as the one you imagine you are - no birds, or other animals. You can’t hear or feel the wind. There aren’t any cars or voices - there isn't anything. There’s only your face pressed down into the semi hard earth, and a small, tugging feeling that this isn’t where you’re supposed to be. 

The next time you open your eyes, you aren’t face down anymore. You’re sitting up, but you don’t remember moving, and there’s no grass or earth or anything familiar. You’re in a room, seated cross legged on plush, red carpet. There’s a small table and chairs, and nothing else of note. You still can’t move your limbs, but you can move your head this time. You think you can probably feel dirt caked onto your cheeks, but your hands won’t reach your face to inspect, and there’s nowhere for you to check your reflection.

Not that it matters. You don’t know why it would matter. 

You wake up in six different places until you stop counting. You think it’s the fourth before you can actually move. Slow, sweeping movements at first - unfolding your legs, or lifting up your arms - and then finer ones like rubbing the grime out of your eyes or trembling fingers through your hair. 

Eventually, you can stand yourself up and explore - not that there’s a whole lot to see. Each place you find yourself is uniquely dull, but dull all the same. There’s nothing suggesting anybody exists here, nothing to suggest you’re not the first person to exist anywhere. You see nobody, you hear nothing. 

You find books a few times, but they aren’t written in any language you understand. When you pick them up, you’re filled with a sudden urge to place them back down again anyway. You don’t care enough to fight this. You don’t care about anything. 

You think you should be hungry, but you don’t hunger. You think you should be thirsty, but you don’t thirst. You think you should be lonely, but that word doesn’t mean anything to you anymore (until it does.) 

There’s a sound. The first time you hear it, you’re in a library. You’re sure you’ve never been here, but it feels familiar all the same. You’re drawn to the colourful walls, and the squishy cushions of what looks like a children’s corner, and your assumption seems logical considering the building blocks on the floor and the scattered picture books on fish and dinosaurs and lost dogs. The only thing missing are the children themselves, hanging upsidedown on beanbags and drawing at the brightly coloured miniature tables and chairs. You cautiously pick up a blue crayon, and suddenly feel so weak you collapse to the ground. You raise your trembling hands to your ears because the feeling of noise is so foreign at this point, and you just want to make it stop.

Still, the sound permiates into your ears, although it makes no sense - doesn’t sound like any word you’ve ever heard before.

Sa-Sa-Me-Y

It hangs so heavy in the air around you, so big and bold and overpowering that you can almost see it sitting there, watching you. You close your eyes, and breathe in deep, and the next thing you can remember is sitting by a lake. The memory of the noise is all you have, until that manages to slip away too.

It feels warm, which surprises you, because you suddenly realise you can’t remember the last time you felt warm - didn’t realise it was a thing you were missing. But the sun beats down on your (unusually pale, you’re sure) skin, and you can feel your lips tugging at the corners. There’s a boat on the lake, and the motor's running, as though somebody had only just been sitting in it, holding onto one of the fishing poles hanging precariously off the side. You peer over the bank, and see ripples in the water, but nothing that you think could be causing them. You reach your hand in, a long-forgotten instinct, and touch the clear blue below. 

As soon as your fingertips break the surface, you feel yourself being dragged under, falling down, down, drowning. 

You don’t remember what it feels like to breathe, and so you don’t. 

You float in the inky darkness for what feels like minutes and years all in the same heartbeat, until something pulls you towards the sky. It’s that sound again, muffled this time. You can feel it in the water, but you still have no idea what it means, where it’s coming from. You try to swim towards it, but the scene changes and the sound is gone.

It disappears for a long time after that. 

There’s a wood that you wander through sometimes. You think you might see an animal a handful of times, but it turns out to just be a branch or a leaf or a weirdly shaped rock. There are signs, written in that language again - the one you don’t understand. They’re always in different places, so you think maybe it’s that you’re in different places too. But there’s something about the air, about the colours and lights that convince you you’re wrong about that. 

When the stones and dirt and twigs start making your feet hurt, you realise for the first time that you aren’t wearing any shoes. Did you lose them at some point? Or had you never had any to begin with? You definitely had - have - clothes. You think about finding some, and the next moment you find yourself in a small bedroom. 

Well, it’s a room with a bed in it. There’s also a small kitchen and a table and a couch, so maybe it’s more like a hotel room, instead. The table is covered again with papers and markers and books and what look like little recorders. There’s a photo, too. A person and their dog, except the person’s face is so out of focus you can’t tell anything else about them. Maybe they’re not a person at all - you don’t recognise them anyway. 

There are a dozen empty bottles on the table, too. A pang of something stabs at your stomach but as quickly as it appears, it slips away again. You notice a half opened suitcase, and riffle through it's contents (half on the floor) until you find a pair of socks. They’re not shoes, but they’ll do, and you spend a long, peaceful moment consumed by the feel of them on your feet.

The next thing you see is the girl.

You don’t know her, but there’s something about her eyes. They remind you of something you can’t quite put your finger on. She’s the first person you can remember seeing ever - and it fills you with such an intense wave of sickness, that you double over. She mimics your movements, and stumbles a little, and the movement her mouth makes has you anticipating a hiccup. Instead you hear a bang, and tumble into the ground which swallows you whole. The last thing you remember of the girl is a slurring blahhburr flaaay which means nothing to you - and you’re not sure why you expected anything else. 

You see the girl a dozen or so times after that, but she’s never awake. She’s laying in a bed, in an unfamiliar room, covered in an old red comforter. Her mouth is wide, and her eyes are shut, and you imagine she’s muttering something to herself as she dreams. You step closer to examine her dark skin, and when you reach out to touch it, you realise that it’s the exact same shade as yours. Even in the semi-darkness, this much is obvious. 

You wonder for a moment if you’re watching yourself, but that can’t be right. This girl feels like you, but she isn’t you. You stand so long considering this, memorising her, that when she opens her eyes and looks at you, you aren’t even surprised when she screams. 

There’s a boy you see sometimes, too. About the same height as the girl, but stockier, healthier looking. His face is constantly painted with an expression of thoughtful delight, and he’s always making that sound - the first one you heard. It echoes in your mind when he says it, thick and dark and ugly, as though laced with the most deadly of poisons. It makes you feel dizzy as you try to hold onto it, make sense of it, but it slips away each and every time. 

You feel a warmth from him, and so you watch him, but he’s being followed by something you don’t like. Something scary - a shadow. 

You don’t like the shadows. 

So you don’t watch him anymore.

The sound is everywhere sometimes. You follow it around, but it spins circles around you, streaming away in a complicated dance that leaves you a mess of limbs and sickness. It floats too many steps ahead of you, all the time. It’s accompanied by others sometimes, though. Those are easier to grasp. 

A ShuHGuHnnnn StiiVez ShOmaE ShA hOO eez SHAhgUh wHOoShamM

It tugs you forwards, through a thousand different scenes. You follow it through empty grocery stores, into a radio station and a diner. You follow it to a small red car, and bang on the windows, but there’s no way to get inside. It stops in front of an apartment, but there’s something heavy hanging in the air. You see the dark skin of the girl through one of the windows, and you so desperately want to stay, but you leave. 

You leave and it hurts. 

But that’s nothing like the pain you’ve started to feel. 

It starts in your finger tips. It’s like a burning, but cold. Freezing. You don’t notice it most of the time, until it travels up your veins, and then it’s like fire. A numbing, all consuming fire that leaves you trying to shriek, but unable to breath as it burns up all the oxygen from your lungs. Sometimes it feels like a thousand stabbing needles, or slashes upon every part of your body. 

Sometimes it’s a dull ache, a memory. The memory of the meaning of the sound - the first sound you heard, the only one that matters. The sound that started this, and the sound you know that will be your end. Your feel a smothering on the part of your body you think your heart must be, because you can feel it now - you know it’s there. You try to count the beats, but there are too many, too many. Sixty, one hundred, seven thousand. You can feel yourself being sick, which should surprise you but it doesn’t. You can feel your skin tearing away, feel the blood soaking into your eyes and mouth and nose. Feel the breaking of all your bones at once, and the snap of something forcing them back into place. 

You're a messy contradiction, but knowing that doesn't make it easier.

You pass out fifteen times before the pain stops momentarily, and you know each time it’ll be back. You think you’d be scared if you could feel anything at all. 

You don’t think you know what feeling feels like. 

You’re scared anyway. 

You see flashes of light sometimes. You mouth the colours as they blip in and out of your vision. Pink. Purple. Green. Blue. Orange. Yellow.
They mean nothing to you, really, but you try to say them anyway. No sound comes out, but you try to say them anyway. You try. You fail. You try.

There’s another light you see, sometimes. It’s blurry around the edges, and shrouded in the shadow that you saw following the small boy from before. It burns with an intensity so fierce, that you want to reach out and touch it. But something pulls you away, every time. 

You know they don’t want you to touch it. 

You don’t know how, but you know. 

You don’t know who, but you know.

You do know why - you don’t deserve it. The light. It’s something beyond you now. You think the light maybe used to be inside you too, but you’re probably wrong.

You’re usually wrong.

There’s a shape that you think might be a woman, but there’s nothing that feels like person coming from her. She’s covered in a strange darkness, not unlike the one you find yourself in sometimes - grasping for stability, gasping for air. 

She speaks in words you don’t understand, but that’s becoming your everyday. 

The noise comes from her sometimes, too. It sounds worried, desperate. She makes you feel worried, desperate. 

She looks at you with eyes like fire, and you don’t know her, but she’s everything. 

You don’t want to know her. 

You can’t look away. 

You know she’s the reason you’re here, the reason you can’t fold sense into yourself. The reason why every time you think you’re remembering something, it’s tugged so far from you that you don’t even remember why it mattered in the first place. You know she knows you, you know she knows everything. You wonder if she’s good, but what does that even mean. 

If you had it in you to fight, you would destroy her, but as it is, you feel dazed and confused until she inevitably leaves again, because that’s all people do, isn’t it? Leave. 

You know you’ve left something, you just don’t remember what, or who, or how, or why. You don’t know anything except that you wish you knew that, because the thing you left behind wants you back, you’re sure of it, sure like you’ve never been sure of anything before. If you wanted anything, you would want the thing you left behind, you know, you know. 

And your face feels wet, and you can hear the sound ringing in your ears, drumming through your veins, but you don’t understand and so you collapse into yourself until you’re nothing once again. 

More and more often, there are people, now. None of them have any characteristics you can pinpoint or memorise, and some of them feel very far from real. Not that you know what real feels like. You expect you’re real, but how would you know. They’re there either way, but nothing changes. 

Every day here is so different, but in essence they’re all exactly the same. 

You’re tired, so tired, but you don’t know what sleep is anymore. Did you ever? Does it matter. Nothing matters. 

You close your eyes, and you open them, and you’re somewhere new, somewhere different, somewhere exactly the same. 

You think it’s destroying you, but you were destroyed long before you came here, you know. You know. 

The girl, the boy and the shadow. They’re coming for you, you can feel it. It aches in all the empty spaces in your body, makes you tremble at the notion, the expectation. The fear reverberates around you, until all you can do is sit, and stare at the nothing until everything is blank. It still hurts, everything hurts now. You think that’s the deal, the payoff. If you let it hurt, you’ll be rewarded. If you don’t let it hurt, they’ll never find you. Do you want them to? You’re not sure. It’s been so long since you’ve been sure of anything. The more you hurt, the less they’ll have to. You probably don’t want them to hurt - why would you. You haven’t wanted anything in so long, so why would this be different. 

The noise is so loud now. It doesn’t stop. If you could distinguish between time and place, it wouldn’t make a difference because it’s everywhere. It’s only when you see the light, the light encased in shadow, that you realise the noise is finally coming from you. Pouring from your mouth, filled with everything you have, everything you’ve ever had. All, nothing, everything in a handful of words.

SammySammySammyStevensSammyWhoIsSammyStevensINeedSammyStevensHelpMeSammyStevensILoveYouI’mSorryShotgunSammySammy
ForgiveMeIWasWrongSammySammyPleaseSaveMeSammySammySammySammyIDon't- 

You gasp for air with a broken sob, and suddenly, he’s there. 

You’re jolted awake - maybe for the last time, and he’s there. You don’t know what it means, but he’s not covered in shadows anymore. You don’t know what it means, but you know it’s because you’re the shadow. You’re the shadow, and next to you he shines so bright. You can’t look at him, he’s too bright, you can’t, you can’t. 

But he smiles. A small, half-smile that seems so familiar, yet unfamiliar all at once. He hesitates for only a moment, before offering you his hand. He says your name, softly, full of love and forgiveness and hope, and asks you (begs you) to come with him.

So you reach out for him, and finally, you're home.

The most remarkable thing about coming home to you, is the feeling of being in motion again.