Chapter Text
Day 1-
Race Against Time. Panic Attacks.
Rotting
"You told me a couple days ago about this what... nightmare?'
Get lots. Get lost in it. A forest, they knew the one. They all did. They got lost in it, they always got lost in it.
"And in this nightmare, you get lost.. right?"
Lost. Yes lost, but not lost. More like relocated and trapped.
"You never told me where you were in this nightmare."
He doesn't know where he usually is. This isn't a place, this isn't some sort of conscious surface that has some sort of time linked to it. He can be trapped in that space for hours and hours on end, the clocks that no longer worked only spun until they shattered. Years there is seconds in the waking world. He runs and runs and runs until his feet are bleeding, until there are brambles stuck in his arms right between the layers of flesh.
There's always a part where he trips and falls, the one root right before the cemetery; or rather that's what he calls it.
"Lloyd?"
Tombs, they were tombs but they were not dug up ones. It was set ablaze one time, a long time ago. Dreams and dream ago the cemetery was on fire and the bodies had been alive. They had been alive and screaming in the fire, screaming in the pits that's would just turn to ash. The pathed grounds would turn to nothing but a snowy despair under his feet. Soft. Shredded. Easy to remove.
An orange hue cursed his face, it burned his eyes to look at them. But he couldn't pull his eyes away no matter how hard he tried too, his eyes were forcefully locked to be staring directly at the burning corpses. They were not corpses before this. They were never even alive and yet they were. Skeletons darkened and frail with sheets of old torn dirty clothing handing off their limbs.
Their jaws unhinged and widened. Organs were dry and rotted to the bodies, they stunk of ashes and decaying flesh. The air would shoot beneath and through the bones making this awful wailing sound. The wailing that filled his hearing every night before his body forced him awake, before the hands attaching from the back of his skull to the sides of his shoulder and face had let go and allowed him to fall back.
Back into the ashes beyond him.
Back where he was fall into that layer of burnt bodies and wooden remains, that fine fine powder of ash. His body collided with it night after night, a distinct difference between the ash that was sprinkled in the night and the night sprinkled into the ash.
His body hits the ground and he falls. He falls into the darkness, it encases him but not in the same ways that the nights darkness encases him. This was different, this was not protective, this echoed the wails this made him burn this made everything wrong this made it snow this made it-
"Breathe. Every time we have talked about your nightmares, this happens. You freak out and I want to know why so I can help you."
Each night he would watch a hand reach into the darkness, it was phase through his chest stealing his breath. It fuels the fire. It fuels the fire. It fuels the burning. It fuels the burning in that empty cavity of which he falls, of which fills him.
They are taunting him with those wails. His friends are lost there. He needs to find them, it's a sudden fear that bubbles within him. Hydrogen peroxide dripping into to wide and open wound. He needs to find them or they are going to be lost too. He can't lose them, he can't lose them to this place. He'll never get them back.
"Lloyd, calm yourself down. You need to focus so we can talk about this. You haven't slept in three to four days and that was before we found you."
"..found me?" Fuck, he wasn't supposed to be found. He couldn't have been found, it was the one rule. If he was found, caught, killed, if he were spotted by any sort of other life form it meant he wouldn't be allowed back into the dream. It was written on the pieces of paper in the beginning of every single dream. Rules he had memorized. he hadn't slept in six days. Six days, two from his own fear of going back and four days from being found. He simply could not sleep anymore.
"Yes Lloyd, we have found you. Your mother has been worried, she's been looking for you and your family for months. Where are they Lloyd?"
They put him in a straight jacket when he got there. They didn't the looks of his arms and were convinced he had done it to himself. It was the branches, he knew it was the branches.
"They're stuck. They got.. lost." His voice shuddered at the term, they weren't lost he just needed to find them, "Taken, separated and I need to find them. I have been looking for them for years and I get taken back to... to that place. I need to find them, you need to let me go." He leaned forward, he pleaded to the person across from him.
There was something strange about being awake anymore.
He couldn't see the faces of people anymore. He couldn't see the faces of the person in front of him. He couldn't see the faces expect for the rotting corpses in his nightmares. He couldn't read time, he couldn't even read the normal papers that were shoved in front of him. The first night he was here, he was delirious and was deemed insane. He would scream and scream until his throat was dissolving its own skin and forcing him to choke on it.
The person in front of him placed down the clipboard on the table to the right. They leaned forward, "We can't let you go back out there. Your time there is over Lloyd. You failed, you were caught." or at least that's what some sort of warped voice said as a skull face dulled appeared behind the persons actually face. Lloyd felt himself fall back in his chair, he couldn't run. He couldn't move. He couldn't move his arms or legs, there was a stupid chain holding him to the chair.
"One. More. Try." It chanted, it chanted as the room went black again. He was awake, alive, dead, moving, stuck, asleep.
"breathe dear boy, breathe. Save your breath for the fires. For the wallowing of the people you once loved, you must save you breath for when you are swimming in their blood."
"Shit. Someone get a doctor in here! The patient is unconscious again. No, no we didn't make any progress today.. just get the kid out of here. Clearly he isn't ready for one on one talk yet. Send him back."
There's something dark about dreaming. Something so warped and chaotic about the scenes the mind creates. A placement of fear and preparing the body for the cases of any uncertain event to be easier to escape. Escaping is the key. It is the key of any type of box one is trapped in. A coffin. A nightmare. A cage. There is no stronger torment than the one of the human mind. It knows all of which that body is capable.
The memories of this person. How to use these to the advantage of its own will. There is no stronger fear than the fear caused by its own memory. There is no greater race than the once in the chest of a never ending heartbeat.
The race against time. The race against death.
He wakes up and his body falls.
He is not to wake up for months, or rather what will feel like months. Lloyd Garmadon. A victim to an illness that has no name, or rather a victim to a terror created by his mind. They know not the planes that exist outside their own thoughts. A shattered reality he and his friends live upon.
He must free them.