Work Text:
Maybe Riz has one or two nightmares.
… Okay, he has a lot of nightmares.
That’s gotta be par for the course, though, when you’re one of the Bad Kids, right? They’re seventeen and they’ve already saved the world like at least three times. That kinda endurance leaves a bad taste in your mouth no matter what.
He asks Adaine, and she reminds him that elves don’t sleep, but that if it helps the one time she did sleep she had a nightmare. He asks Fabian, and he handwavingly announces that he remembers plunging a sword through his father like it was yesterday, which Riz is pretty sure counts as flashbacks rather than nightmares, but it’s close. He asks Jawbone, and Jawbone agrees that going through so much trauma in such pivotal years of your life would definitely mean that nightmares are not out of the ordinary, but can’t offer much in the way of therapy to overcome it.
“I’m aware of rescripting,” Jawbone tells him, “but I don’t know the technique, and given my - uh - history, I don’t exactly have any colleagues to refer you to.”
“Thanks anyway, man,” he sighs, and heads home from Mordred for the day.
His mom’s there, which is a rare blessing. She sits down with him and ruffles his hair and forces him to drink a hot chocolate, “because it’s enough like coffee that your brain might not notice, and then maybe you’ll get to sleep at a reasonable hour, huh?”
“I don’t know,” Riz says into his mug. “Maybe.”
“What, something keepin’ you up?”
“I just - I have a lot of bad dreams. About everything. Mom, a lot of bad stuff’s happened to me, and all my friends.”
“It has, and you are so strong for making it through all that, honey. And you can always talk to me about anything, or Jawbone, or I’m sure your friends will be there to listen? They know exactly what you’re going through.”
Only - only they don’t, is the problem.
It’s easy to forget, is the thing, when he’s done reminding himself that the night terrors are nothing more than visions, that… they kinda are more than visions. They’re… reflections, he supposes, of his subconscious. Of stuff he still needs to work through, and he knows it.
“It is a lovely evening we are having, Riz Gukgak,” Baron says.
Sometimes they’re at a fancy dinner, dressed to the nines, Riz choking on the stiffness of his starched collar. Sometimes they’re on a riverboat, or stopped at the top of a ferris wheel, or lost in the woods with no landmarks in sight. Tonight they’re at a roller rink. Unparsable chatter from every angle, neon lights, squeaky wheels. They’re sitting in a booth off to the side, pair of fancy mocktail drinks sat between them. Baron isn’t drinking theirs; it doesn’t have a throat. Riz doesn’t exactly have an appetite right now.
They both know he doesn’t know how to rollerskate. The shoes on his feet don’t have laces. If he tried to run he’d just make a fool of himself; they both know that, too.
“What’s up,” he says, monotone.
“I think that you know what is up, Riz Gukgak,” responds Baron, just on the wrong edge of too quickly to be genuine, “we are having a lovely evening on our date together, and you are showing your romance partner a good time.”
“I defeated you.” He knows it to be true, but that doesn’t stop the 80s music around them from blaring. “I won.”
“And yet the fears I represent, they did not go away. Did they, Riz Gukgak?”
He drops his head. Stares into his fizzy blue drink that could be made with drain cleaner for all he trusts his subconscious, same as he stared into the mug. “No.”
“Look around. Do you see anyone you recognise? Anyone who would say hi to you, if you did not say hi to them first?”
He doesn’t move.
“I said look around,” and dream logic shifts his gaze, sends him spinning three-sixty round a rink full of people who don’t know his name, don’t care about his achievements, wouldn’t even give him the time of day if he wasn’t part of a more interesting party. People who are wrapped up in each other, more importantly - people with soulmates. People with dreams of a future for two, and only two. “It is everywhere. You are going to be left behind, Riz Gukgak. You know this.”
He settles back into himself and grips the table with both hands, wishing he could just shoot this thing and be done with it - but that’s not how these dreams go. That’s never how they work. He just has to sit tight and relive his worst fear until he wakes up.
(Sweating, never screaming. It’s not a fear like fear of spiders, or falling from heights. At least those have a clear, if gory, end. Abandonment just sweeps in like cobwebs in an empty house; sits there, stagnates; waits for you to wear yourself out banging on the basement door.)
Baron reaches over, takes his hand in its skeletal grasp, and dream-camera-shot-reverse-shot he’s looking into the sockets of their endlessly hollow eyes.
“This is just how the story goes, Riz Gukgak. You cannot change the script. You can only watch as everyone you love finds somebody they love more.”
… The script, huh.
Riz hadn’t exactly received the help he was hoping for when he reached out to the people he trusted. But he hadn’t learned nothing, and he’d looked up that word on the bus ride home, and he thinks maybe he’s got a stab at trying it out for himself.
This is probably an insanely risky move - but hey, what is Riz if not willing to go all out?
“Okay, back it up, we’re gonna take this from the top.”
“... What?”
Riz shakes his hand free of Baron’s, balances himself on roller-y feet as he stands and tries to address the rest of the room. He’s not tall enough to be seen over the booth from every angle, but he hopes his loudness will kinda cancel that out. “Everybody, cut, we’re gonna go from the top, okay? And this time I wanna see some group interaction going on, please. One or two pairs is fine, but you can’t all be splitting yourself in twos, it looks a little - y’know, samey. Even some solos would be good, alright? Thank you. Okay, places, please, and - action!”
He watches the room. Dares it to disobey.
And, amazingly, the dream starts over.
Unparsable chatter from every angle, neon lights, squeaky wheels. They’re sitting in a booth off to the side, pair of fancy mocktail drinks sat between them. Baron isn’t drinking theirs; it doesn’t have a throat. Riz is sipping on a Blue Lagoon Limonata with one hand on the silly straw and the other keeping it steady by the stem. “So,” he says, “nice evening, huh?”
“What are you doing, Riz Gukgak?”
“I’m rescripting. Sure, you’re good at reminding me of all the worst possible paths my life might be about to go down - but it’s my brain, and I can control what I think about just fine. So, we’re in a new dream! One where you got stood up for your date, and I am just chilling out with you, commiserating like we’re old pals.”
“No, that is not true. You are my romance partner and you are being very -”
“Aren’t you made of lies? Can’t you hear one when it’s coming out of your own mouth?”
“You will have to meet my stark -”
“Newsflash, buddy,” says Riz, standing up and giving Baron one last flick in its weird, porcelain mask-y forehead, “the Nightmare King’s long gone. That magic has no power over me any more. And I know, yeah, you’re not actually here because of the Nightmare Crown’s magic, you’re just a leftover metaphorical representation of my insecurities about abandonment. But it’s my dreamscape and I make the rules, and the rules say that while I’m in control, you’re just some sad motherfucker who got -” he does jazz hands, just to seal it in “- dumped.”
He walks away, observing as he goes the other people in the rink, under the blacklight and the 80s music and the lemony syrup vehicle of a “drink” in his hand. Some of them are couples, sure; the silhouette of Ayda’s wings and Fig’s horns is hard to mistake, and all these faces have to come from somewhere or his brain couldn’t present them. But a lot of them are in groups of three or four or five, and a lot of them are alone, rollerskating to their own beats, nodding to the music, taking in the atmosphere off to the sides.
And he notices, in the seconds before he remembers that he’s not in a roller rink, he’s lying in bed, sun battering the blinds on his first good night of sleep in a long time, that hey! This time round he’s not wearing any skates at all.