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Nimona’s nightmares are violent.
It’s unsurprising, really. She’s a creature made of violence. Good things, too, kindness and humour and loyalty right down to the bone, but violence is what forged her and she revels in it. Part of her resents that, her willingness to lean into that creature her world wanted her to be, that monster, but it’s who she is all the same. Violence and quick trickery and sharpened fangs is what keeps her family safe, so if violence is the brush her world has chosen to tarnish her with, she’ll snarl and bear her teeth proudly.
Her nightmares are things made out of fresh embers and dark spaces. They are filled with whispers, commands, orders. If there’s one thing Nimona hates, it’s being told what to do, and in her nightmares she cannot escape from her collar. She sees other things, too, namely Gloreth and her damn wooden sword and the furrow in her brow and the billowing fire behind her. In other nightmares, she sees Ballister. She sees herself as that - thing that she’d morphed into, the great hulking beast that lurks in the crevices of her soul, and she sees herself tearing right through him. Or she sees that look on his face when he’d said ‘you know what you are,’ something haunted and harrowing. She sees his realisation that they are just two sides of the same coin and the way he’d spat on that.
Nimona’s nightmares are violent, so the entire household hears when she wakes up with them. She screams, and lashes, usually. She feels the electric crackle of the Institute’s weapons down her spine, trapping her, forcing her forms to shift. She feels herself being pushed in a tight little box, feels herself being forced into the tightly-constricted spade of girl, person, human.
This nightmare is no different.
She wakes with Ballister staring at her from the doorway. He’s lit from behind with the fairy lights (she keeps them on to provide some light, well used to waking up in the midst of the night screaming or sobbing) eyes wide and scared. The light is dim, dying. That unsettles her more; for all of her fondness for decorations of a punk flair, she loves the light. She can’t sleep without it; a soft comfort in the midst of her own chaos.
“Nimona?” He says softly, stepping closer. She knows, in her head, that he is safe. That he’s her boss, and far more than that, he’s her friend. She’s saved his life, a dozen times over, and he saved hers, the time it mattered. He is one of the only people in her life to not run away screaming when they saw the real her. “Are you - alright?”
She whimpers, instead of answering. She backs away.
In her nightmare, she’d been in that form. The convoluted mess of everything she was, all her anger, all her pain. That form was the direct echo of everytime she was called monster, every time a scared child had run away from her, because nothing was more threatening to them than someone who was different. She had been in that form, glowing white heart bearing down on the sword, and Ballister hadn’t been there to stop her. There had been no soft whisper of ‘ I see you, Nimona,’ no, instead, he’d been down there with the rest of them. Calling her a monster. He’d had his sword with him, the one that he’d pulled on her, hand right by his belt. Except he hadn’t stayed his hand, he’d driven his sword right into her heart. (The way she’s always thought she deserved.)
So when she sees him, she flinches away.
He squints at her. He gets closer to see why she’s so scared, hand out to shield her from the light, like he’s approaching a scared cat. She wriggles right away from him, cocooning herself in a safe mass of blankets. She’s not seeing Ballister, not seeing the kind man who prevents her from burning the entire house down when she bakes, who changed his entire worldview, spun it right on its head because she was in danger. Instead, she’s seeing the Knight he once was, cold-blooded, ready to murder anything deemed a monster in the name of Gloreth herself. She sees the sheen of his sword when he’d held it cautiously but firmly in his hand. She hears his voice, asking her why she had to be the way she was, and wouldn't it be easier if you were just - a girl?
“Nimona,” he says again, and sits cautiously on the edge of her bed. She wrenches herself firmly away, eyes wide with fear, diluted terror. It’s laughable, really. She’s Nimona. She’s everything all at once and yet she’s scared shitless of the dark and a nightmare. “What’s wrong?”
She breathes. In. Out. Ambrosius tried to teach her how to do this, once. ‘Bal gets anxious easily,’ he’d said, ‘ so. Doing this helps.’ She’d been stubborn, at the time (mainly because she still wasn’t on the best of terms with Ambrosius, he’d chopped off her boss’ arm, afterall) and turned her nose up at offers of lessons for breathing techniques, but Gloreth, she wishes that she’d listened now. All that she manages to do is cough and splutter and - and she can’t even shift, she’s so tightly wound up, like a spring, she can’t even shift to be something greater and bigger and better than what she is, instead she’s just a scared little kid curled in a blanket trying not to cry, and-
“Nightmare, yeah?” He guesses, and cuts through her unfolding thoughts, “Do you… want to talk about it?”
She swallows. Shaky. “No.” She mumbles.
He gets up. “Okay, then,” he murmurs, and tilts his head to the side, “I’m going to make some hot cocoa. Would you talk about it then?”
“No.”
“Alright,” he says, and he slips off again. A few moments later, he returns, cradling two mugs carefully. The grip with his metal hand is lax; if he applies too much pressure, glass and fine china has a tendency to crash. (Nimona is working on a new arm, upgraded, but it’s a surprise.) “I made too much. Guess you’ll have to have some.” He says it completely deadpan.
She feels too feeble, too weak to even reach out for the mug, or haul herself up into a seated position. Whilst he’s been gone, she’s managed to calm herself, managed to regain her breathing, managed to rub the tears from her eyes. She sees Ballister, and she doesn’t see a creation of the Institute anymore, not fully, but fragments of her dreams border into reality.
“Here,” he puts it on the bedside table, “Have some. It’s good.”
“Are you sure you haven’t burnt it.” She jabs softly. She doesn’t really know why she says it, she’s usually the one to put the kitchen at risk, but Ballister squints at her all the same in the way he does when he can’t quite tell if he’s supposed to be laughing at her or not. She thinks it’s an improvement on his other expression, the kind where he looks like a lost and kicked puppy. It’s how he’d looked when he’d first walked into her room. Like someone had kicked him in the stomach, hard, and he was only just beginning to get back up after being winded.
“Quite certain, yeah,” he says, and takes a sip of his own drink to prove a point. She raises an eyebrow when his eyes go wide and he almost spits it out; she’s unsurprised, she could see the steam curdling in the air. “Okay. Yeah, maybe a bit.”
“You didn’t stir it, did you, boss?”
“No.”
“So it burnt to the bottom of the pan.”
“Maybe.”
“Now,” Nimona’s grateful for this distraction, because it’s something that isn’t talking about why she woke up screaming, “That’s hypocritical of you. You’re always telling me to make sure to stir every five minutes, so-”
“Drink your cocoa,” he tells her gruffly, and she rolls her eyes, but she listens. She takes small, steady sips, and feels the warmth return to her. (She gets cold, when she has nightmares. Gooseflesh pricks her skin incessantly. She shivers, and shivers, and huddles under her covers.) “Do you want to talk about it?” He asks her. He’s never particularly blunt with her, not since the very beginning when they were still finding their feet, but he is now. Something shines in his gaze, and she blinks up at him quizzically.
“Not… not really,” she admits, “S’just. Same old, same old. Not worth thinking about.”
He flinches. “Do you - have the same nightmare often, then?”
She shrugs. She really, really doesn’t want to be talking about this, she can feel those horrible chilling pinpricks wriggle up her spine, but - she guesses that she has to.
“Yeah,” she admits, “Not every night. Just - sometimes.”
“And they’re bad?”
“Horrible.”
“Right,” he swallows, “Am I - in them, every night, then?”
Her eyes go wide. She almost spills her drink - some hot liquid spills over the rim, slips down her fingers, but she just ignores the burn. “Why,” the chocolate slipping down her throat tastes like bile, “Why - why do you ask that?”
He blinks at her. He rubs at the back of his head, averting his gaze, and her mind races. “Because I heard you,” he says, “I got up to get Ambrosius his - peppermint tea, and I heard you. Talking. I thought - maybe you’d shifted in your sleep, you talk a lot when you do that, but you were. Saying my name.”
“Oh.”
“And you sounded- scared. I thought you were asking for help. But I don’t - think that was the case.”
“No,” she admits, softly, in a way she seldom is, “It isn’t.”
She hates this. More than anything else. Because she’s - she’s fucking clawed her way to this, tooth and nail. She’s fought as hard as anything to be able to trust other people again, and have other people trust her , and look at her like she’s something more than just a - you know what you are - monster. And she knows that admitting what she’s been seeing in her dreams to Ballister - she knows that it’ll ruin them. He’ll hate the fact that that’s the way she sees him, still, in the depths of her subconscious mind. And then he’ll kick her out and she’ll be back on the streets with nothing but her wits and her weapons and that’ll just be it, like Gloreth all over again, and-
“Breathe.”
She’s hyperventilating again, in that horrible way that ordinary people do, and she feels - horrible, for thinking that she should be above this, be above panic, because she’s not ordinary, she’s Nimona, but she’s desperately trying to drag gasping air into her lungs anyway. “Not doing those - stupid - exercises-” she manages to cough out.
“I’m not asking you to. Just - breathe. Come on.”
She breathes.
In. Out. Like a lullaby. Like a stream.
“Better?” He asks, and she nods.
“Yeah,” she mumbles, “Just about. Sorry,” she adds, which is - ew, she’s Nimona, she doesn’t apologise, but - tonight is weird and stretched and different. “I’m sorry I woke you up.”
“You didn’t,” he says, “But - we need to talk about this. About your - nightmares.”
“Do we have to,” her eyes are pleading, “I really - don’t wanna.”
“I’m not going to make you,” he says, “I just - I just think it’ll help. And-” he blinks at her with those big eyes of his (usually she’d make fun of him for it, but she feels like she’s had the wind knocked right out of her lungs) and swallows and says, “I just - why did you sound so scared. Why did you look so - terrified. When you saw me.”
“You’re - scary,” she replies, trying to make it into a joke because it’s what she does best, really, “Your name is literally Evil Larry-”
Ballister looks deeply unimpressed, but above all, upset. And that - it deflates something in her. She sighs, because she knows that she’s going to have to tell him. “Sorry,” she mumbles, “You’re right. I’ll talk about it.”
“You don’t have to-”
“I do, though,” she bunches up bedsheets between her fingers, and lets the fabric fall smoothly from her fingertips. “It’s - the day The Wall fell.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Right,” his arm makes a mechanical whirring sound, and then stops, she wonders if he was reaching for her shoulder or if she’s just imagining things. “I mean. That makes sense, it wasn’t a great day for anyone. I don’t think.”
“No,” she shakes her head, “It was - that day, but not really. Things went - differently.”
“How?”
“You didn’t…” she swallows, “You didn’t help me.”
“On the, uh, sword?”
“No,” she shakes her head, “It’s - stupid, I - forget it.”
“Whatever it is, it’s not - stupid. You’ve- you’ve been through a lot, kiddo. You need to talk about it. You can’t just - let it… fizz.”
“Fizz?” Nimona raises a brow. “You need to get better at your metaphors.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” she takes another sip of the cocoa and sets her mug to the side and crosses her arms. “I do.”
“So,” he’s carefully positioning himself on the bed so they’re not quite touching and he’s not really looking at her, and she doesn’t know if he’s doing it on purpose or not, but she’s grateful for it, “Stop - fizzing. What do you mean I - what’s the dream about?”
She links her fingers together. She’s careful with it, methodically pressing the tips of her fingers together and moving her hands so her palms touch just so, and pulling away again. “You didn’t help me,” she says it in a quiet guilty little whisper, “You - you were down there with everyone else. Swords and pitchforks, and - cheering me on. Saying that I should just - get it over with. There’s no place for a monster, that’s - what you said.” She wipes at her face, disrupting her methodical little stimming routine, and tries furiously to avoid his gaze. “It’s stupid because you wouldn’t do that. But - it’s what I’ve been dreaming about. And it’s - horrible, because I usually shift, after a nightmare, it’s easier to face when I’m a fox or a rat or whatever, but I just - can’t. Not after those dreams.”
He stares at her. His eyebrows slope low in the dying glow of the flicking fairy lights, and there’s clear and obvious guilt written into the curve of his lips, in the sheen of his eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault,” she says, and taps her forehead, “Just my big dumb brain.”
“No, I’m… sorry. That you couldn’t talk to me about this sooner, I’m -” he frowns, “I would have told you that it’s not just you.”
She stares at him.
She doesn’t know what he means, she can’t put the pieces together, until she thinks oh, and realises - he must be having the same kind of nightmare, he must still be thinking of Nimona as a monster rather than what she really is, he must really think that Gloreth’s sword is what she really deserves-
“You have?”
“Yeah,” he says, “Not about you,” he adds, and she tilts her head to the side, open-mouthed, curious. “The same kind of thing, though. About… someone I love doing something they’d never do. Not now.”
Nimona is as smart as a sharpened flint, so she guesses, “Ambrosius,” without a second thought, “And the-” and she just has to gesture vaguely at his arm for him to nod.
“Yes,” he says, “That. Except it’s - it’s all dialled up, and it’s not just what really happened. It’s - it’s the worst things my head can pile together all in one dream and it just doesn’t stop. And I know he wouldn’t do that, or say those things, but I see it all the same.”
“I mean,” she says before she can stop herself, “He did really chop off your arm, so that part is accurate.”
He looks at her the usual way he does before he goes into a long lecture about how Knights were trained and what the Institute expected of them and how Ambrosius feels really, really bad about it and how it was an accident really, so to save the time and his voice she holds up her hand. “Uncalled for, sorry,” she says quickly, “But I think I get what you mean. I just don’t like it.”
He gives her a small, tired smile. “I don’t think anyone does.”
“Not just the nightmares, I just,” this is uncomfortably honest, for Nimona, she hasn’t spilt her guts out like this since Gloreth and playing in the fields and hopping between a deer and a bear and a bird, but things took a turn when he came in her room with the cocoa and she doesn’t think she can feel worse than she already does, “Don’t like the idea that I think of you. Like that. Even in the back of my head.”
“So do I,” Ballister murmurs, “About - my nightmares, I mean. But I know Ambrosius wouldn’t do that. And - hopefully, you know I wouldn’t even dream of doing that to you.”
“I know you wouldn’t,” she replies softly, “I think it’s more - it’s not you. It’s the - embodiment of everyone in this fucking Kingdom who once wanted to run a sword through my heart, and now I’m supposed to pretend like there weren’t posters calling for me to be killed. And that I’m only - if I hadn’t taken out that cannon, if I hadn’t stopped the Director, they’d still be up. It’s that. It’s not you.”
He’s looking dead ahead when he next speaks, not even trying to meet her gaze. “Same for me, I think,” he says, “It’s not what really happened with my arm. It’s that half of the Kingdom was waiting for me to fuck up so they could say that they said that was going to happen.”
She barks out a laugh. It comes out like an actual bark, and she smiles, despite herself, because she can feel the itch of shifting right beneath her skin and she knows that if she wants to, she could change, she could be a shark or a monkey or a bear and Ballister wouldn’t bat an eye. But she doesn’t change. “I think,” she says, “That the Institute fucked up both up prettyyy good.”
“Y’know, I can remember you saying something like that.”
“You didn’t want to hear it at the time, but I was right, obviously,” she frames her chin with her hands carefully, “You don’t - hate me, do you?”
He squints at her. “Why would I hate you?”
“For…” she waves a hand in the air, “For seeing you like that. I know you wouldn’t ever speak to me like that, you’d never do that, but that’s - that’s how I see you, all the same.”
“Of course I don’t hate you,” he says and she can tell that he means it, “As far as I’m concerned, that’s not me. It’s - a big old clusterfuck of everything the Institute wanted its Knights to be, what it wanted the people of the Kingdom to be. Not me.”
“Maybe I should give it a nickname,” Nimona suggests, almost slyly, “I dunno, maybe, like-”
“I know what you’re about to say, and I’m not going to allow you to let it happen.”
“You can’t make rules for things inside my head, boss.”
“I can when it’s about me, and I’m not letting you call my - evil nightmare alter-ego Larry.”
“Do you have any better name suggestions?” She grins at him.
He shakes his head. “No, but-”
“Then it’s settled.”
“It isn’t,” his gaze darts to the doorway, and she can see him trying to stifle a yawn, “Listen, I don’t think I’m going to be able to get back to sleep, it’s - almost 4am.”
She blinks at him, and briefly considers something. “Why did Ambrosius ask you to get him peppermint tea at 4am?”
He stares down at his hands. “I might have, uh, lied about that.”
“ Bossss.”
“Sorry! I didn’t want you to think that you woke me up,” he says quickly, and then goes to stand up, “I was just going to say - I don’t think I’ll be able to get back to sleep. D’ya fancy a quick game of World Domination?”
She hadn’t been prepared to get back to sleep, either - her nightmares drain her, in a way that doesn’t quite invite restfulness or tiredness, but rather a kind of deep rooted exhaustion that leaves her tossing and turning for the remainder of the night, wide-eyed with stagnant fear. She sees the opportunity to escape from shadowy figures and haunting memories for the rest of the night, and takes it.
“Sure,” she says, and flashes her teeth, just barely, “But you’re letting me be the dog.”
(Later, when Ambrosius wakes up from his sleep, he walks into the Living Room to an unfinished game of World Domination. Ballister and Nimona are fast-asleep on the couch, Nimona taking the shape of a tightly-curled fox resting up against Ballister’s whirring mechanical arm. He takes the blanket, and lays it over them, and leaves them where they sleep, dreams peaceful and free of twisted nightmares.)