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Dream liked thunder. From the recluse of his room he could feel it more than hear it, murmurs to rumblings that brought visceral shivers up his bare spine. They were rare, the nights he wasn't pressed to do anything or speak to anyone, nights he could peel off his socks and drape his comforter over himself, relishing in the cool air kept between the tiny feathers inside. He liked the nights where the drumroll of raindrops on the roof and palm leaves out back was loud enough that he could barely hear his own breathing, barely discern his heartbeat from the pattering surrounding him. These were the nights he could turn over, lie on his stomach, arms above his head and eyes squeezed shut against the pillow, and it would almost feel like he was a teen again back in his bed at home, the same unforgivably distinctive Florida rumbling against his casement panes.
It had barely been three years since he had to consider his life permanently altered for better or for worse by a jarring level of success, the thought heavier and heavier on his mind. It wasn't time to reminisce on that though, he reminded himself. Right now it was him and the storm. It didn't matter if there was another body sleeping down the hallway, he was alone in the familiarity of how the lighting would cross paths across the sky, casting a welcome millisecond of light, never enough to process what it illuminated. He remembered his mother telling him in passing that there were more lighting strikes in Florida than anywhere else in the world. Logically he knew she had actually said in the country or the continent, but his brain chose to remember it on a more substantial scale. He didn't know why the fact had stuck with him over memories he wished he was able to say he cherished like how he felt when he first fell off his bike without training wheels to cradle him, or the smiling face of a brief friend he spent an elementary school camping trip with until his family had to drive back home.
Still, he pushed the what-ifs to the back of his brain and let the reverberance of the rain fill in the rest, flooding his temporal lobe and washing away the responsibilities he would wake up to once the sun had taken every trace of the stormclouds back. Then the mirages on the cracked asphalt and some stray leaves would be the only reminders of the peace before, only noticeable when the people who cherished the storms looked for what was left. With the sun would come the sweat, barely noticeable but a near-constant bare sheen, and the screens around his house, as well as the ones on his lap and in his palm, would glow with the sun, hardly fading until a stretch into the morning hours. Dream turned, lazily turning one of his pillows over to a side that matched the cool whispers the comforter made as it dragged across his bare shoulder, the shuffling blending into the static of the thunder that rolled, getting more and more distant as the sounds of droplets spaced out. Dream huffed a little and hoped the storm wasn't over, not yet, he wasn't ready to focus on his heartbeat again.
The pattering started its crescendo again as he shut his eyes, a lightning strike white through his eyelids. The clouds were just making their rounds over him. The storm would stay.