Work Text:
Tell Me I’m Real
Anne dreamt. And in her lucid dream she saw herself. In the black void of a starry night. Chunks of land floating among nothingness as if gravity and other laws of physics did not apply to them. Ruling over the domain was Anne. She looked at herself. She was made of pale stone, crackling with blue energy which was boiling up to the surface. Her eyes were stars, her skin the soil of the earth from which nature bloomed, her hair a wild nebula of elemental building blocks of life, planets formed, lived, orbited, and died in heat death around her fingers. Anne knew she was a woman in her mid-twenties, but when she looked at the other her she was thirteen years old again. And she was frowning two frowns.
Anne woke up in a sweat, in her bed. She was panting and gasping for air. She was having a panic attack. She didn’t feel the tears beginning to stream down her face until her vision went entirely blurry. Her sudden awakening had stirred Marcy out of her sleep by her fiancé’s side. Marcy opened her arms and allowed Anne to leap into a warm embrace. Marcy ran her fingers through Anne’s hair like she always loved to do, and kissed her lover on the neck, she tried her best to reassure Anne. But she herself was becoming unnerved, these ‘nightmares’ were becoming a regularity. At least Marcy assumed they were nightmares, Anne never explained what was happening, all her cries and whimpers and rageful proclamations were cryptic and enigmatic.
“Shhhh, it’s okay, it’s okay, baby.”
Anne managed to speak words through all the sobbing. Anne spoke with hysteria, sorrow, and anger, “Tell me. Tell me I’m real. Tell me I’m the real one!”
“Y- You’re real Anne.”
Anne nestled her head in between Marcy’s neck and shoulder and stayed there for a good while. She couldn’t bear to look up, at Anne, who was there in the room with the two of them, looming over them. She spoke nothing. Simply watched, observed a life that wasn’t hers.